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Background information
For the past thirty years, French MAGNUM photographer Antoine D'AGATA has been showing the contemporary conditions of a battered humanity. He questions the limits of the photographic process, does not consider society as a whole to document it, but immerses himself in the violence of the world at his own risk. His images are subjective gestures that aim to displace the boundaries of visual representation outside the ordinary conventions of photography.
Content
The photo volume 'Psychodemié' is a visual document highlighting the human vulnerability revealed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Completed, in Brazil in February 2022, the 520-page book consists primarily of thermal images taken in hospital intensive care units, refugee centers, and uninhabited public spaces in France during the months of containment from March to June 2020. It questions the global social and political dynamics in the context of the pandemic under the incandescent setting of a city confined to hospitals where nurses and patients carrying the virus perform a daily ritual of life and death gestures.
Antoine D'AGATA transforms these opaque spaces into a theater of shadows. He erases the very surface of things, the skin of beings and the skin of the world, to better reveal its tragic dimension. It questions also global economic and political dynamics through a health crisis that has revealed the fragility and responsibility of all. It is in this ambivalence between solidarity and contamination, this fatality of social and physiological death, that the photographer tried to apprehend, elaborating and affirming, through the photographic language, the possibility and of new gestures of resistance which transfigure the bodies. The thermal image freezes the forms, the postures, the figures in forms imperceptible to the naked eye." (slightly adapted text, © Studio Vortex, 2022)