Wrapped in Flesh and Blood / Antoine d’Agata

Giulia Piceni in conversation with the French photographer.

Approaching fear, vulnerability, and intimacy, along with the philosophical and political dimensions that shape his relentless exploration of human experience, in this conversation Antoine d’Agata offers a rare insight into the mind of an artist whose vision is inseparable from the intensity of the life he inhabits.

Antoine d’Agata’s photography exists at the edge of life, navigating with the mastery typical of those that belong to the dark spots of reality, the shadows where violence and mortality converge. Over four decades, his work has chronicled the extremes of human existence from the marginalized spaces of nightlife and addiction to the stark realities of war and political conflict. In this conversation, d’Agata reflects on his relentless pursuit of truth through the lens, exploring the visceral immediacy of lived experience, the ethical and existential imperatives behind his practice, and the fragile balance between documenting that world and succumbing to it.

You grew up in Marseille, the son of a butcher. That origin feels almost symbolic: the proximity to meat, to incision, to transformation through violence. How much of that early contact with flesh still inhabits your understanding of photography as something visceral?

Of course, even if I never thought about it when I was younger. There was a long gap between the moment I left my parents’ house and the moment I became a photographer, almost fifteen years; working in the St Louis slaughterhouse in Marseille wasn’t something that consciously shaped me at the time. But looking back, I realise that I was seventeen and, in those early mornings, surrounded by dead flesh… it had some effect on me. I don’t know if it changed the way I see the world, but it made me more empathetic towards a certain level of reality. I’ve always been pragmatic; I’m an atheist, I don’t believe in anything beyond flesh and blood. So yes, it must have left an imprint on my mind and my way of seeing things.

You emerged in the 1990s, a decade marked by AIDS and addiction. That atmosphere of death through pleasure seems to permeate your work. How has your relationship with destruction evolved now that violence has become more digital, mediated, and detached?

I’ve always tried not to become detached. Empathy defines my relationship with the world, and I constantly struggle to remain vulnerable and sensitive, to not grow numb to violence or to the tragedy of contemporary life. My sensitivity to processes of chaos and destruction haven’t really evolved, and perhaps that’s something I should question, but I still feel rooted in the same energy that shaped me in the 1990s. When I was seventeen, I was already influenced by extreme and street-level politics, by the Situationists, by the idea that politics should come from lived experience rather than abstract thought. Consciously or not, I’ve stayed within that same perimeter. My work today still tries to merge ideas and physical experience; to criticize, analyse and understand the social and political context I live in, while remaining connected to an instinctive, physiological approach to life. I’m not ready to sacrifice either dimension. So the work remains existential, most of the time self-destructive, but also politically and socially engaged. It might sound contradictory, but I see it as part of the same drive, of the same necessity and imperatives: being a social being, aware of my responsibilities as a citizen of a global community, while staying in touch with the darker, more mysterious depths of the human condition. That’s what I keep digging into, the darkness that defines what it means to be human.

You once said that photography is not a way to look at the world but a way to live it. That statement, and your own life, abolish the traditional distance between document and experience. Fiction appears antithetical to your method, yet you often describe your life as if it were scripted, a film unfolding through lived experience. Do you consciously choreograph your own descent into this void, making life itself the fiction you refuse to write?

You are right. Everything I have tried to do over the past twenty-five or thirty years has been about displacing the understanding we have of photography. Photography has always been considered as the art of looking at the world, of framing, lighting it and composing it in the most beautiful or meaningful possible way. For me, it has never been about looking. It has been about experiencing the world, about pushing my physical, emotional, mental limits. From the very beginning until today, I try not to lose sight of the fact that I am not here to observe life but to live it, to contaminate it with my political perspectives, to invent strategies to invent my own existence. You speak of choreography, I could use that image that relates life to dancing, playing, that implies movement, going into circles and responding to the urge and responsibility of keeping in motion. 

In my case, it is also about writing and living up to my ideals and convictions. I have given myself the challenge of inventing new, unprecedented scripts for life and trying to live up to the level of literature, of the fictions that have inspired my wanderings.
I draw inspiration from novels, poetry, philosophy, not from art and photography, deciding to what extent I can live in my flesh what I desire and what I fear. The people I photograph survive under immense social pressure and economic violence. In the night world, they inhabit territories and live destinies they did not choose, surviving and reacting to the forces that oppress them. Yet through that imposed condition, they manage to elevate their lives to the level of great tragedy. I feel privileged to have lived close to them, to have struggled on their side, to have witnessed and shared that intensity and dignity. So yes, my life has been lived following a consciously written scenario, one that I do my best to live up to every day.

You have often said that you feel privileged to spend time with people on the margins, where pain and honesty coexist without filters. Do you think that proximity to suffering is the only way to achieve truth, or are you experimenting with new ways to reach for it?

For a very long time, I gave up on any attempt or illusion of finding answers or truth. To this day, I do not seek truth. What matters is to keep searching. I know I will never find definitive answers, and I have no illusions about it. But searching is the only dignified way we have to live our lives. When I was a teenager, I may have had illusions, but now I only search for the sake of the process itself, for the sake of searching. I do not want to stop feeling, I do not want to stop hurting. It is about excess, and intensity. Regarding your question about proximity to suffering, yes, for me, it is essential. I have spent my life trying to photograph different forms of violence, and the people who open spaces of life, consciousness, and action, who live beyond the limits to reach the impossible are those who live in darkness. On the bright side of the world, life often feels lit but superficial. In darkness, people must survive. To defend themselves against the violence imposed upon them, they have to invent every possible way to exist and feel, to reach far beyond what has been denied to them. These strategies for survival (whether sexual, narcotic, or criminal) are the only ways they can exist. Since I was very young, I chose to live on that dark side of the world. I have challenged myself to encounter or create new situations within that perspective, and it has become a strategy of life. I try not to become hardened or detached. I have never become stronger or more in control. My approach is to remain as vulnerable as possible. That vulnerability must be confronted every day in new situations, and maintaining it is also supported by my nomadic way of living, which I have sustained for many years.

And when everything becomes so transient, like not having a fixed house, not having fixed uh collectible things, like the majority of the people that lived in the light, as you say, what does the whole concept of belonging still carry a meaning for you? 

I belong to the people I am with, at the time I am with them, and to places nobody has access to. We speak about nomadism, but this also applies to relationships, states of consciousness, the use of narcotics, desires, fears, and all emotions. I don’t try to resist these experiences; I try to confront them and push beyond what I can physically and mentally endure. All these strategies are ways to test the limits of body, mind, and soul, to go beyond what seems bearable. They allow me to be fully available to the intensity of the moment and to reach what lies beyond reason, what is not understandable, acceptable, imaginable, or conceivable.

In the light of this embracing of instability, fear seems for you a propelling force: you move toward it rather than away from it. Is curiosity your antidote to fear, or are both symptoms of the same compulsion to confront the void? When was the last time you were scared?

As far as I am concerned, the only antidote to fear is fear itself. The only way I have been able to overcome fear is by confronting it directly, through instinct and desire, as closely and intimately as possible. Only by facing it head-on can I move past the states of passivity that we often adopt for the sake of comfort. So yes, the antidote to fear is fear. I am still scared, and I am grateful for it. I can still feel fear in many situations, and experiencing it is what allows me to remain present and alive. Perhaps that is why today I feel less intimidated by the ultimate, inevitable aspects of life.   

You have often said that technique has never been your concern, yet your visual language is unmistakably characterized by a dense darkness and light consumed by grain and shadow. If the technical gesture is secondary, what then defines your image? Do you think that photographic style for you should be directly linked to the subject choice you make?

Of course, as a photographer, I am aware that language is essential. Photography is not only about feeling, understanding, and inventing a perspective; it is also about communicating that perspective. In that sense, style and language are determinant, essential, but I made a conscious choice not to become dependent on technical precision, style or dexterity. My strategy is, in any situation, to consider the technical and aesthetic aspects only insofar as they allow me to merge with the moment, to blend into the situation, and let the language emerge naturally. Whether I am documenting what I call (criminal…) night violence or (economical…) day violence, I allow myself to reach a state of panic, vulnerability, and sometimes despair, not knowing exactly how to photograph it until tension forces me to act instinctively. This approach is, for me, an antidote to becoming overly professional or overly artistic, to avoiding the trap of capitalising on a specific style or language. It is a way of letting the image be defined by the experience itself rather than by preconceived techniques or ideas. 

Since I was very young, I chose to live on that dark side of the world. I have challenged myself to encounter or create new situations within that perspective, and it has become a strategy of life.

Since losing sight in one eye, your perception of the world has been physically divided. Has this asymmetry of your gaze revealed something that should have remained unseen?

Not really in relation to photography itself. Losing an eye had, in many ways, a social consequence. It kept me somewhat outside the community and weakened my social skills for a long time. The world felt artificial, like a spectacle I had to struggle to penetrate. It was a real handicap. Some have suggested that it could have become a tool. Because I see in a flattened way, my brain does not have to translate three-dimensional reality into a flat image. In that sense, it may have been useful. As for whether this asymmetry revealed something that should have remained unseen, it might be the case. I have always felt the urge to look beyond the surface of reality, beyond what is tangible, beyond what is immediately visible. That impulse is not connected to my vision. It comes from doubt, from fear, from the awareness of not knowing anything. I have no ideology to proclaim, only a necessity to remain as true, fragile, intense, and alive as possible. In part, it is about accepting the fallibility of both body and human nature. It is also about my incapacity to act against the horrors I witness every day. The rage, frustration, anger, and disbelief provoked by the state of the world are overwhelming. These emotions, these facts, I can often only translate into images through distortion, accumulation, repetition and the recurring violence embedded in the photograph itself.

Among the works that have been ostracised by the press, Atlas (2013) is among the most notorious. In the movie/documentary, the sexual acts that you perform become both tenderness and violence, communion and decay with the bodies you photograph appear suspended between the erotic and the cadaveric. Do you see sex as a language through which one can fight death, a way to accept mortality and embrace it until the last orgasm?

I do not see sex as a language. I see it as a strategy, a functional tool to reach extreme states. I am not interested in sexuality itself but in physical and mental territories contaminated by sex, by narcotics, and by all types of dynamics that accelerate and intensify states of consciousness and human behavior. This allows us to go beyond what is considered normal or acceptable, beyond what is commonly understood as sexuality. For many years, it was like hunting, focusing only on specific aspect of the sexual act where everything concentrates, – fear, death, pain, ectasis, horror -…, and pushing through it. In the end, it is a strategy to reinvent the usual protocols of existence. It is not about my person, but it always involves the person in front of me. I see it more as a philosophical or existential quest, as a mean to elevate things to a higher dimension, a more excessive experience, a more profound level of awareness. 

You have described drugs as a means of perception, a chemical tool for dismantling consciousness. In which way has your way of seeing the world or the self been altered by it, and how has it shaped the photos that you take? Have you ever thought about giving yourself an ultimatum, to stop using drugs and go back to a clean photographic eye?

First of all, I should say that I began using substances many years before I took my first photograph. About twelve years before my first images, I was already using hard drugs. It did not happen out of photographic concern. It was a pre-existing condition that had always been deliberate, something that shaped and predetermined the way I would later encounter photography. In a strange way, my entire life before photography followed the same principals, the same continuous movement between two opposite territories. On one side there is what I call the world of the day, driven by political, economic and urban violence, all matters that define contemporary life. And then, there’s the night world, that resists to the first one. In daylight, I photograph in a very precise, cold and neutral manner, I do not pretend to be part of the picture. I am simply a witness, a presence trying to document, as clearly as possible, the violence that is unfolding. Inside the night everything changes. I no longer take photographs; I create conditions for situations to happen. I create scripts, scenarii, invent strategies to make sure some images that will document my actions and experiences come into existence. I am not looking at the world anymore but enter the frame as a fully responsible character. It is no longer about photography. It becomes about inventing a destiny, living life at its most intense and extreme level, without protection and out of control. I lived in this schizophrenic dichotomy from the very beginning, as I lived in the streets at the age of seventeen. Moving constantly from lucidity to loss of control, from theory to praxis, from intelligence to animal instinct. The chemical substances did not push me into this process. They simply were part of the context, long before I decided to go further, towards something I thought was impossible.

On this topic, you once said your goal is not to die of it but to get close enough to the edge of life as the only way to experience it fully. What happens when that void that you navigate through the photographic lens and through your own existence starts annihilating you? Is that ever something that has worried you or is something that pushes you to go even further? 

I do not even need to consider it because it is not something that might happen one day. It is something that has been happening from the very beginning. At the age of seventeen, I was already badly damaged. It has always been a constant and continuous process. For years I have struggled every single day with the symptoms and the consequences of the way I chose to live. These consequences are physical, emotional or mental. I am worn out and I am used in many ways. It is a slow and constant decline. It is the body wearing out, the mind wearing out, the work wearing out. But my convictions and a certain sense of empathy keep me from giving up. I try not to think about it and I do not worry about it. I accept the fatality of living and working in whatever conditions I am confronted to. I do not see it as some type of performance, but as my responsibility and privilege. It is not about some abstract meaning but about experience and action. What matters to me is the capacity to resist and the refusal to compromise. It is a subjective measurement that’s not logical nor reasonable. I refuse accepted limit. And when in agony, it will not be about accomplishment or bravery. But about the capacity to make a final attempt, to reach out for the last time. That would be enough.

I would like to look at more recent work of yours. I was looking at your Instagram and I stumbled upon a few images, your recent images of war, common graves. Those pictures of war’s common graves possess a paradoxical beauty, recalling Lee Miller’s dilemma: how to photograph horror without purely aestheticising it. Being also part of Magnum Photos, how do you navigate the documentary dimension of photography? In the same fashion as Miller’s photos, how will we be looking at your shots in a couple of decades?

Regarding aestheticisation, things seem clear to me. I accept the fact that my images can sometimes be aesthetic, even beautiful in whatever way one might define that. It is always a deliberate choice. My goal is to confront the viewers, to force them to see what they do not want to see. And the only way I can achieve this is by seducing them in some way, by tempting them through the form. My practice is not journalistic or humanitarian. It is not documentary in a traditional way. I am documenting my own process, I try to contaminate the spectator, trying to say what hasn’t been said, trying to show what cannot or should not be seen, reminding the ones who are responsible and their accomplices of what they do not want to know or be reminded of. The image becomes a way to overcome the spectator’s reluctance to face what goes beyond his capacity or willingness to understand. Regarding Magnum and the tradition of documentary photography, that is a different matter, anecdotic as far as I am concerned. My photography goes against much of what has been accepted as mainstream journalistic or artistic photographic tradition. Its purpose is to question, or to destroy, the habits and conventions from the inside, within the very institutions that have codified and limited the immense capacities of the photographic tool. I am not worried about someone looking at my images in the future, or about being successful in my attempt to displace the photographic language from the preoccupation of the gaze towards the obligation of action. At this point, I do not worry about what people understand or accept from the images. My main concern is not letting my photography be silenced.  

I have given myself the challenge of inventing new, unprecedented scripts for life and trying to live up to the level of literature, of the fictions that have inspired my wanderings. I wanted to live in a deliberate way owing a lot to the writings or Rimbaud, Artaud, Céline, Bataille, Debord and others.

You don’t want to lose the coherence of your method, I would say. 

And it takes a lot of physical strength which sometimes I do not have anymore. It takes a lot of everything. Because it is a destructive process. Because it is an agonizing and isolating process. Day to day, on a personal and intimate level, on a familial level, on the social and professional levels. I am struggling through the difficult relationships I have with the people I photograph or do not photograph, with the ones who try to help me or to neutralize me. It is damaging. It is intense. It is violent. And I must focus on the work, even though I lack the means and lose my strength. I sacrifice as little time and energy with others so that I can keep going. It is difficult economically, it is difficult politically, and I feel helpless, or hopeless, in many ways. But that is all I have. I fight for principles. I fight for morals. I fight for a kind of purity that I will not compromise to the comfort of the spectators, critics or other economical actors of the artistic scene.

And I know you have just said that you do not care about the final perception of your work, but I feel it is important to ask you. Looking at the times we are going through, with societies becoming more conservative, with the rampant ascension of fascism all over the world, how will your work evolve in this scenario?

I have no illusion about my capacity to be efficient in any way. I am too isolated. I guess the only thing I could hope for, the only thing I would wish for, is to play the part of those insects what Pasolini wrote about…

Yes, “La scomparsa delle lucciole”. 

Exactly. Maybe the memory of the work will remain as a possible alternative path, as a valid political or existential strategy for isolated beings looking for ways to resist the economic violence and cultural lie. That’s it. I do not pretend to be some sort of militant or warrior. And my gestures are purely symbolic in some way. 

During your 147-day residency at the Centre Pompidou, you dissected and catalogued four decades of your own work under public observation. How did that act of self-examination change once it became a public performance? Did the exposure of your archive alter your sense of intimacy and vulnerability?

Yes. During those months of presence inside the museum, the mental and physical pressure were extremely violent. The public dimension of the performance, if I call it that way, was overwhelming. Communicating constantly with the visitors, answering questions, sharing an intimate work process with so many people hour after hour, day after day, while building the archive was an impossible task. But that was the point. It was exhausting. And it was beautiful too. Allowing a flow of person with very different intentions and reasons to intrude and enter a private space. It was intense and sterile sometimes. Destructive also when the protocol diminished my capacity to work. I was meant to focus on what I was doing, and the public exposure made everything more complex. But I function well in extreme contexts. And building this structure, this machine was a desperate act. From the very start, I had no interest in exhibiting. I only needed to build an archive, to save what could still be saved from those years of nomadic life. I had to search and recover whatever could trace those thirty years of photography. The physical dimension of this construction was essential. The archive will not be exhaustive, but it had to exist. And beyond generating new images, I am struggling these days to build a space which will integrate this huge archival structure. The cube I built at the Pompidou will survive in the place that will become a strategic and symbolic environment, and a workplace. Maybe I will have a few more years to continue working on that. So yes, this was also an artistic and strategic gesture. Maybe because I no longer have the capacity to produce that I used to have. The body is damaged. And I need to work to, financially, keep myself able to work. Teaching, selling prints from time to time, allow me, with difficulties, to take more photographs. It is a continuous struggle, and I must admit the limits of my practice.

I feel this is a universal struggle in the creative domain, even if I hate the word creative. You once sent thousands of undeveloped rolls of film to the Niépce Museum, refusing to see them yourself, as a statement about the importance of creating regardless of the result. Have you ever felt that your life has become more important than your photography? Thinking of those photographs, is it important that your legacy survives? Is this something you even think about?

You know, I was never able to find the point of perfect balance where life and creation would be equal. It has always been a continuous and frustrating attempt to delimitate an impossible space. At certain moments I was still too much of a photographer, and at other moments I was too involved in life itself to care about photography. During the last thirty years I have moved back and forth between thinking too much as an artist and thinking too much as an addict of all sorts. Both extremes probably damaged the work in many ways. Yet in this movement, in this oscillation, I found a form of balance and serenity. This endless quest allowed me to live at heights and depths whose possibility I didn’t suspect. I feel privileged and I am grateful to life I was able to live through all this. I know there is no possible way I could do more or better.  The specificity of my position as an artist, as a human and social being is probably to have based on provoked experiences and situations, the course of my existence. The inspiration of that attempt to live in a deliberate way owe a lot to the writings or Rimbaud, Artaud, Céline, Bataille, Debord and others. I never compromised on this attempt to live my life to the height of words and ideas. I tried to live and to make a point. With old age already there, I cannot help but look up to the void. But my concern isn’t the amount of time left, nor my lack of perspectives or expectations. I am an atheist. Darkness will eventually take me. I think of death. I think of those who left. I think of those who’ll stay behind. 

I get it. It is very beautiful that you are thinking so universally. Even after this interview, I get such a clear sense that your practice is solitary, yet there is a continuous generosity coming from you and from your photography, and that is very beautiful. I just wanted to say that.

Words are only words, but it is in the small, in the wounds, in the obscure that we find possible ways to approach dimension of the tragic, of what we have in common. Let’s not neglect them.

No, that is a great thought. Thinking about pearls of wisdom like this one, when teaching young photographers, what is the lesson you find yourself repeating most to them? What do you see as their generation’s greatest obstacle? 

I am not a teacher, but someone who communicates and exchanges with younger, or less experimented photographers, and I go to great lengths to make sure they do not become victims of the cultural lies or illusions that take place around photography, around whatever art is supposed to be. I try to make sure that they do whatever they do not only out of an aesthetic concern, but also from an intimate, physiological, political, and animal urge. I want them to understand they can make the choice not to be a consumer nor a spectator. 

On this topic, do you think that photography still has the power to disturb and infect or has it become too part of this system of comfort that you’re alluding? Is there hope for you?  

This makes my position frustrating every day. The photographic image is a tool that gives me the capacity to occasionally go where I need to go, to translate my experience of the world in something I can somehow communicate to others. And in the same time, the use of photography has never been so extended through human society. But, in the contemporary world, images are manipulated, perverted, formated, dangerous to the extent that it becomes the privileged medium of a global and totalitarian system of communication. In some way, I cannot escape this state of things. Part of the work ends up in public space, in a context that is, as a matter of fact, damaging its own purpose. It is the enemy’s territory. Every day, I reconsider my process, assess the context, redefine possible perspectives and strategies, to preserve my capacity to act and react. I am conscious of the dangers, and know my position is fragile. As soon as I have the means to assure my autonomy for a short while, I give up professional and social obligations and return to my own logics. It is not a comfortable dynamic but it is the most I can do. It is about being unapologetically yourself and using every available mean to resist the dominant powers, from within.

During our exchange of emails it was mentioning that you’re currently working on a documentary. Could give us a little bit of a sneak peek regarding your most recent projects, what you’re working on?

The film mentioned in my email is a long‑term documentary some people are making about my work. As for me, because my body is broken and my mind exhausted, I consider bringing the work to a close. Maybe because of the current state of things in the world, I will focus on political violence the next three or four years before putting an end to my practice. I am working in relation to found archives, drawing some kind of abstract geopolitical map of the world. It comes down to moving through time and territories, into the dark realities of human society. A few days ago, I was in Vietnam documenting the fourth generation of handicapped victims of Agent Orange, chemical used by the US Army during the war in the 70’s and still genetically transmitted, fifty years after the events.

Wrapped in Flesh and Blood / Antoine d’Agata

Credits:

Photographer: Antoine d’Agata / @antoinedagata
Special thanks to: MC2Gallery, Vincenzo Maccaron, Art Icon / @mc2gallery, @vincenzomaccarone, @art_icon.official
Interview: Giulia Piceni / @giuliaapiceni
Editor: Maria Abramenko / @mariabramenko

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