A needle sinks into a tattooed forearm, drawing a pale light across an anonymous cross-section of limbs. Some- one’s hand, taut with force or tenderness, emerges from the gloom, clenching the arm and bringing its veins to the surface. The skin is like chalk on a blackboard. The tattoo is of a face. Two gaping black dots lower down on the arm may be freckles.
Like many of Antoine D’Agata’s photographs from this early nocturnal series, which moves across black-and-white underworlds, grainy bodies and blurred beasts, there is something of a half-memory about it, a ghostly undertow of this did not happen, despite the visceral immediacy of what is on display. This phantom stitch between flesh and fog, exposure and numbness, not only conjures something essential about the medium of photography itself, but becomes in these images an almost sacrificial approach to the form, a way of casting it back into obscurity. “It’s about trying to not be a photographer,” says D’Agata. “I was never interested in photography as a beaux-art. As something you have to follow rules and respect and adapt to. I always saw [it] as a way to weave into darkness.”
His own experiences of excess lie behind these crepuscular, needles-eye glimpses, captured by the camera almost independently of D’Agata’s control. Instead they resulted from the chemical pathways of fear, pain and pleasure that his total immersion into these night-lives opened up, in stupors of sex and drugs; a will to destroy his own spectatorship. This quality has drawn frequent comparisons to the raw photographic language of Nan Goldin and Daido Moriyama, even as his camera started to look outwards across a more conventionally photo-journalistic range of subjects spanning the atrocity exhibition of our modern globe. Genocide, extremism, abuse, addiction, incarceration, war and industrial decay— these are the molten shadows and hollowed expressions that emerge from D’Agata’s multi-decade career; a world of darkness electrified by a terrible light.
And between the sheer mass of buildings and bodies that find their reflection in D’Agata’s archive and his own restless habit of pushing against the limits of the photographic form in order to provoke alternative perspectives, a distinctive formal technique has taken shape in his work over the past few years— one of radical accumulation. Faces, trees, silhouettes, landscapes, bricks, windows, cells, skeletons, bedding, brothels, mugshots, borders and burials— these are both categorised and interlaced, arranged into grids and mosaics that are by turns uniform and sprawling, imbued with an almost topographical texture. Not only does this approach evoke the infinite multiplication of images that currently forms our digitally-mediated experience of the world, but it ensures that each fragmented photograph is denatured beyond its individual content towards new forms of recognition, new typologies of meaning. At their core, these works reflect D’Agata’s disinterest in searching for the ‘good image’, as something with both a predetermined aesthetic and material criteria, something based perhaps above all on the understanding of it being a single, freestanding photograph.
Grids are structures of simultaneous order and chaos, a contradiction resolved by an underlying system or ‘paradigm’, as D’Agata’s collages are titled. The operations of power or violence that mediate and disguise this act of balancing are rarely made visible by any single example of something appearing quotidian or aberrant, but instead are unravelled by the points at which something is both or neither. D’Agata’s grids stage this effect in the way that dark and graphic subject matter is neutralised by repetition; the more there is the less we see. And from the lines that divide or suture each image together, to the bricks and pigments that dissolve into pixels, the literal limits of the rectangular image give way to an almost abstract collage of granular details— those that the single photograph might in fact conceal. Their materiality and chemical composition becomes another process to trace, one D’Agata has literally embodied in their capture. “The number of images is related in a very specific way to the chemicals or tightness or madness that pushes me to work. So I think part of it is existential, part of it is narcotic, part of it is just obsessive.”
D’Agata’s role in the creation of these images is almost violently bound up within his own subjectivity and inner darkness, where his ability to see and understand is eclipsed by a desire to feel and to act. In their arrangement and accumulation, the viewer who comes to witness these seemingly authorless imageries can only confront their own role in organising their contexts and content, looking past what is on display towards what has been submerged by the excess. Reckoning with all the ways that we are in control and not.
Antoine generously shared a selection of these images, speaking to me about his work at the Magnum offices in Paris. On one of those days he recalled a walk through the forbidden zone at Fukushima, photographing the otherwise unassuming houses while following the cackles of a Geiger counter to avoid the scattered radiation spots. He points across the room, describing how a single radioactive shadow might fall in one deadly corner, even as the three others remain clear and silent. As we skimmed the pages of his photo-books, I found myself looking for something, listening for something, but I’m not sure I caught it. Maybe I should have closed my eyes.