Biography
ANTOINE D’AGATA
Antoine D’Agata was born in Marseilles in 1961. In 1983 he left France and lived abroad for ten years. In 1990 he was in New York, where he studied at the International Center of Photography with Larry Clark and Nan Goldin. In the same period, D’Agata worked as an editorial assistant for the Magnum Agency in New York.
After his return to France in 1993 he took a break from photography until 1996. His first book of photographs, De mala Muerte was published in 1998 and the Gallerie Vu in Paris began distributing his work the following year.
In 2001 he published Hometown, and won the Niépce Prize for young photographers. His exhibition 1001 Nuits was held in 2003, the same year that he published "Vortex" and "Insomnia". In 2004 he joined the Magnum Photo Agency and published “Stigma.” The same year saw his first short film, Le Ventre du Monde. This film making experience led to his first feature length film Aka Ana, shot in Tokyo in 2006. Antoine D’Agata’s art features a dualism and contraposition between dreams and reality, visionary nightmare and perception of the world, anguish and sexuality, poetry of the body and uncontrolled delirium of the mind, solitude and carnal sharing of pleasure, existential pain and vital eroticism. This artist’s photography is extremely complex and reveals to the spectator his condition as a suffering individual, lost in a nothingness artificially created by man to deny the emptiness that surrounds him.
After his return to France in 1993 he took a break from photography until 1996. His first book of photographs, De mala Muerte was published in 1998 and the Gallerie Vu in Paris began distributing his work the following year.
In 2001 he published Hometown, and won the Niépce Prize for young photographers. His exhibition 1001 Nuits was held in 2003, the same year that he published "Vortex" and "Insomnia". In 2004 he joined the Magnum Photo Agency and published “Stigma.” The same year saw his first short film, Le Ventre du Monde. This film making experience led to his first feature length film Aka Ana, shot in Tokyo in 2006. Antoine D’Agata’s art features a dualism and contraposition between dreams and reality, visionary nightmare and perception of the world, anguish and sexuality, poetry of the body and uncontrolled delirium of the mind, solitude and carnal sharing of pleasure, existential pain and vital eroticism. This artist’s photography is extremely complex and reveals to the spectator his condition as a suffering individual, lost in a nothingness artificially created by man to deny the emptiness that surrounds him.
