Signed; Antoine D'Agata - Ice - 2012

On December 1, 2010, Antoine d’Agata wrote: “For the past two years, I have no longer been able to photograph. How can one convey the intensity of reality through a language that remains bland and artificial when faced with the violence of senses pushed to excess?” When preparing the texts for the publication of Ice, the photographer chose to call upon Rafael Garrido. Antoine d’Agata relinquishes control: he places his words in someone else’s hands, just as he often entrusts the camera to various people, asking them to photograph the situations in which he himself has been immersed. A loss of control. “Helpless in the face of a premeditated fate, the disorder of things and the rules of men, I crawl. I cure myself of being a man through doubt, and through play.”

It is, indeed, a matter of curing oneself through the other, through the creation of a community bound by passion: “Within the closed circle of poverty, chemical addiction spreads and slowly establishes the self-evident necessity of degeneration, of a new social order that would take the form of an orgy. The tentacular presence of disease inhabits the spaces and bodies I pass through, and which pass through me.

The smell of death permeates our dreams and our embraces. The prostitutes contaminated by the virus offer themselves to death, just as they surrender themselves to the world passing through them.” Bodies thus touch, collide, absorb one another and dissolve into the images; the women’s names—Ka, Srei Lea, Avi, Lili, Bopha—merge in the writing into a single “nameless girl.” The mirror of appearances is shattered; reality is raw. Yet nothing in d’Agata’s work is gratuitous: ultimately, it is our world and its inhumanity that are being denounced. The horror that emerges over the course of the pages is not so much a photographer’s “journey to the end of the night” as it is the unspoken filth and violent hypocrisy of a system that crushes the flesh of those who have been denied a voice.

Antoine d’Agata documents what he experiences at the very moment he experiences it—that is, everywhere in the world. He commits ordinary or extreme experiences to paper. The photographs arise from the chance encounters and situations that occur along the way. As far as possible, the choices are unconscious. Yet the obsessions remain the same: the road, fear, darkness, the sexual act. The brutality of the form and the exaggeration of the vision compel us, more than images that claim merely to document, to confront the reality of what we are seeing. The viewer can then truly exist, no longer finding themselves in the position of a voyeur or consumer, but instead sharing an extreme experience and questioning both the state of the world and their own condition. Ice is conceived as an intimate journal spanning the period from 1999 to the present, combining photographs, drug use and sexual acts.

—Raphaël Garrido