Antoine d'Agata - YAMA (signed), ed. 278/500 - 2013

Yama — Antoine d’Agata. In 2011, Antoine d’Agata was in Cambodia, further exploring and documenting the space between photography and his own experience. In the closed confines of a windowless room with red-painted wooden walls, he connects with L, a prostitute addicted to “ice” (methamphetamine) who will not live long. Until the end, she uses pleasure as a way to assert her existence in a world that denies her any other rights. In the perverse circles of social violence, where desire cannot be separated from pain, alienation, and rage, the photographer pushes his radical practice outward, probing and challenging every form of moral certainty. He abandons his position behind the camera to establish an unprecedented photographic method, stepping into the frame of his own fate and gradually becoming a character in a scene he has chosen to live in flesh and blood. In solidarity with an impossible community that uses every means to relinquish control of a language rendered useless — fear, ecstasy, the death drive — he is no longer merely an observer; he invents his own position. Through the tension released in naked moments of extreme emotional and physiological fragility, his scattered images confront the viewer with the impossible truth of overflowing ecstatic bodies. They explore a sense of annihilation, breaking all barriers and transgressing acceptable limits. An autobiographical magazine that documents addiction to desire. A chaotic, biased sociology of survival strategies. A senseless yet essential manifesto of excess and crime.