ANTICORPS — Antoine d’Agata, ATELIER EXB 2013

Anticorps spans twelve years of d’Agata’s life and work, a descent into the underside of desire, addiction, and nocturnal survival, where the camera serves as both weapon and witness. It is a book that bleeds.

Photographed in motel rooms, brothels, crack dens and the blurred peripheries of cities, Anticorps resists clarity in both form and content. Images collapse into grain, blur, overexposure, flesh and shadow—where the body appears less as a subject than as a battleground. D’Agata’s visual language, influenced by Araki, Moriyama, and the radical fringe of Magnum (of which he is a member), refuses distance or detachment. These are not portraits, they are invasions—of self and of others.

The black cover gives nothing away. Inside, more than 700 pages of photographs and texts explode across the senses: diaristic, confrontational, at times violently intimate. It’s a work of photographic excess—ambitious, exhausting, and ethically uncomfortable. This is not a book that flatters the eye; it implicates the viewer, pulling them into a world where language and image begin to fail under the weight of lived experience.

Anticorps remains one of the most important photobooks of the 21st century—an artefact of radical subjectivity and physical exposure, a book that belongs in the archive not for what it shows, but for what it dares to live through.

Technical Sheet
Title: Anticorps
Artist / Author: Antoine d’Agata
Date: 2013
Technique / Printing Method: Offset printing
Medium / Materials: Hardcover photobook
Dimensions (cm): approx. 24 × 32 cm
Language: French
Pages: 728
Publisher / Editor: Éditions Xavier Barral
ISBN: 978-2-36511-003-7
Condition: Gently used