Softcover 1st edition
Void (2018)
120 pages
hardback 17,5 cm x 23,0 cm
Text in Portugese, with English text in an accompanying booklet

Limited Edition of 400 copies.

Concept, Design & Publishing di Void nel NOV ’18

‘Oscurana’ presents a body of work that results from the various trips that Antoine d’Agata has made during more than thirty years in American countries: Brazil, Peru, Nicaragua, Salvador, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guatemala, Haiti, Puerto Rico, United States, Cuba, and Mexico.

The images are notable for its immediate, almost brutal vision of the societies taken by the brutal spiral of violence. Through the degeneration and paroxysm of the flesh, the photographer tries to reveal fragments of a society that escape the usual analysis and visualization of the collective body. He exposes himself, sharpens his awareness of a world that absorbs and feeds, without any precaution or judgment.

Edited from a common selection of Antoine d’Agata’s images from Latin America, 7 different books share the same dimensions, title and artistic statement – a text called ‘Oscurana’. The project is done by different invited publishers, that were given the freedom to select the images, the design, the materials, printing and binding techniques.

‘Oscurana’ is a collaborative project developed amongst 6 publishers from different countries. Offering a reflection on the work of the Antoine d’Agata by several countries and publishers, in a dialogue that opens new perspectives in the ways of making photobooks.

For ‘Oscurana’ project, Void proposes a book to be autopsied. The reader will dig in the darkness within Antoine’s oeuvre, being themselves, the legists of d’Agata’s universe. An investigation from the intimacy, through the narcotic experiences until the darkness of the violence’s banality in America.

Born in Marseilles, Antoine d’Agata left France in 1983 and remained overseas for the next ten years. Finding himself in New York in 1990, he pursued an interest in photography by taking courses at the International Center of Photography, where his teachers included Larry Clark and Nan Goldin.

During his time in New York , in 1991-92, d’Agata worked as an intern in the editorial department of Magnum, but despite his experiences and training in the US, after his return to France in 1993 he took a four-year break from photography. His first books of photographs, De Mala Muerte and Mala Noche, were published in 1998, and the following year Galerie Vu began distributing his work. In 2001 he published Hometown, and won the Niépce Prize for young photographers. He continued to publish regularly: Vortex and Insomnia appeared in 2003, accompanying his exhibition 1001 Nuits, which opened in Paris in September; Stigma was published in 2004, and Manifeste in 2005.

In 2004 d’Agata joined Magnum Photos and in the same year, shot his first short film, Le Ventre du Monde (The World’s Belly); this experiment led to his long feature film Aka Ana, shot in 2006 in Tokyo.

Since 2005 Antoine d’Agata has had no settled place of residence but has worked around the world.