PORTRAITS: Photographer 1 Research

After using the library catalogue on myUCA and through browsing in the library, I found a photography book called 'Photobox' (by Roberto Koch). In this book there were many well known photographers that I came across, one being Antoine D'Agata. 

The photographer I decided to choose for this project was Antoine D'Agata. I have picked out a few of his photos that stand out to me and inspire me:
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Antoine D'Agata was born in Marseilles in 1961. He decided to leave France, however, in 1983 then go to New York in 1990 to pursue his interest in photography. He attended courses at the International Center of Photography in New York. In 1993 he returned to France but didn't do any photography for 4 years. 

"Antoine D'Agata approaches the night as a man, not as a photographer. He loses himself there; it is a journey into darkness, where both words and thoughts unravel and identity becomes atomized. D'Agata's obsession is flesh, the physicality of bodies withered by addiction to pleasure and pain. His scenes are based on emotion rather than narrative, on the contact between reality and the observer; D'Agata's does not seek to document the world, but rather to explain the photographer's role in it. 

'In my photographs, in my daily practice of artifice, I cannot pretend to describe anything other than my very own situation - my daily state of mind, my own personal fluctuations.' Solitude, orgasms, eroticism, pain, change, danger, desire - his anxieties reflect those of the broken characters ravaged by alcohol, drugs and vice who appear in his work; and in the cracks and crevices of their used and abandoned bodies he explores the essence of their being. 

D'Agata's experiences occur in moments of intense sexual and existential tension: the camera scrutinizes the physical and emotional intimacy of writhing bodies, seen on the very limits of a reality that has been stripped of its false boundaries. There is no joy; life is brutal. Desire and pleasure are intersected by death and peril. His photography is one of violence and despair. 

D'Agata's interest in exploring the unconscious, in unearthing the intense sensations that come from underground lifestyles and that defy the bourgeois social order. As there is no place for deviance in that order, his photography is one of protest: 'The pornographic gesture, paradoxically, becomes an explicit alternative to the monstrosity of social interactions that revolve around unfulfilled desire, frustration and paralysis'."

Koch, R. (2009). Photobox. Thames & Hudson.

"It's not how a photographer looks at the world that is important. It's their intimate relationship with it." - Antoine D'Agata

"He has traveled the world's darkest corners collecting images of characters from the night's furthest edges: prostitutes, addicts, war-torn communities, and the homeless, published in a book in 1998".

Magnum Photos. (2018). Antoine D'Agata • Photographer Profile • Magnum Photos. https://www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/antoine-dagata/

The 4 photos I will be looking at in further detail are:
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I really like the tiling effect used here to convey the woman's emotions during a clearly painful sexual intercourse. D'Agata uses extreme pale lighting and pale colour tones on the woman to expose her and make her skin look pale, clammy and fleshy, highlighting her bones and veins. This physically makes the viewer (in this case, me) feel isolated, exposed, disgusted and sickly. It is scary because the woman looks somewhat monstrous, ghostly and zombified, but yet at the same time is erotic because of the woman's sexual orgasmic body positions and posture. Therefore D'Agata intersects and intensifies the feelings of pleasure with pain. 

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D'Agata here uses a very low shutter speed to create a somewhat ghosting, alien, zombie, monster effect. This effect is mainly only being used on the man on top of the exposed woman. The viewer can insinuate that the man here is about to have sexual intercourse with the woman. Her lifeless, weak body posture (also with her hair covering her face) alongside the super slow shutter speed effect on the man, connotes to us that she is in an unsafe, scary situation and does not want this to happen. The extreme pale lighting which isolates them in the frame also helps to portray this well. My emotional response to this image is fear, dread, sickness, disgust, sadness and pain. It is a truly horrifying and disturbing image to look at. 
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I really like how the woman in the image looks almost barbie like, made of plastic. Her body is exposed through being naked and the use of extreme pale lighting on her skin. Her writhing body posture connotes that she is scared, vulnerable and exposed. This image makes me feel grotesque and sickly, as do the other images above. I also like how there is a harsh contrast between her icy pale skin and the black mattress she is lying on. I can sense there to be no connection between the woman and the photographer, she is huddled out of sight appearing to not want her photo taken. I empathise with the woman's fear and vulnerability. I am inspired for my portraits to focus on the human body and all it's skin, blood, bones and emotions. I like the idea of exposing the human body and focusing deeply on it's vulnerability and weakness. 



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The tiling effect can be seen again here. D'Agata illustrates a series of images here which all connect through black and white colour, yellow/brown lighting, harsh tones, slow shutter speed and graininess. I am inspired by the exposed naked bodies used in these images and the body postures/positions used by the people within the images, for example in the central brown tonal image, a male is grabbing a woman forcefully around the neck from behind. I also like how D'Agata evenly dispersed the images with brown tones around the images in black and white. Unlike with the other photos above that I looked at, this series of images portrays erotica and sex more so due to the use of warmer yellow colours, harsher contrasts and lighting, extreme graininess and seductive, suggestive, alluring looks and postures given out from the people in the images. Alongside those aspects, there seems to be more of a connection between the photographer and the people in these images, this is why I feel more safe, connected, warm and stimulated when looking at them, compared to the other 3 images that I looked at which left me feeling isolated, scared, vulnerable and cold.