In the film, a descent into the farthest corners of distress unfolds through hazy moving images that feel like a thick, haunted dream—an unending night. Voices drift above, closing in on each frame. Every woman offers a story that is both poetic and terrifying, recounting lives doomed to hardship. The scenes show them waiting for clients beside ruined walls or in forests at the city’s edge. In filthy rooms and on rickety bunk beds, they prepare drugs, inject, and smoke. They engage in masturbation or intercourse. These are images of hell, or perhaps its foyer. Alongside these figures appears d’Agata himself, often visible as another worn and wandering figure before his intended subject. There are moments when the screen becomes hard to endure.
D’Agata attended the auteur and experimental film festival in the fall, Screened in a short circuit. The film, shaped by the French photographer and filmmaker, is being reintroduced in Santiago de Compostela as a work in progress. There, he confessed that watching these images today is not easy for him either, though his reasons differ from those of his audience. For this reason he never stopped refining the film, continually adding new elements in pursuit of a kind of perfect montage—an inner logic that may take final form during an upcoming stay in Istanbul. His plan includes the Pompidou Center in Paris and finishing outlines of this and other projects with input from the public during workshops.
“Actually I have no cinematographic ambitions. I do not want to make a good movie. Atlas is simply a tribute to the people who opened the doors of the night to me,” he explained in a meeting with a Santiago daily a few weeks ago. Close to the subject, the photographer is the exact opposite of the feelings his film conveys: warm, approachable, and incredibly kind, living by a different set of expectations than most.
D’Agata centers injustice, pain, and violence in his work. If he sometimes becomes the camera’s target, it stems entirely from empathy. Like the characters in his film and many of his photographs, he has often pursued life as a drug user. Or at least he did until recently; today he continues to consume, but in a controlled way, he notes. He has made his body a battlefield between pleasure and pain. He again shares his vulnerability, choosing to spend his life among the most punished on Earth. Reaching ‘highs’ with them facilitates this intimacy because, as he explains, “chemistry is the shortest path to unimaginable intensities.” He has faced violence at the hands of traffickers and pimps, and like many other figures who appear from time to time, his life has teetered on the edge of collapse. Atlas. “The theme of my work is violence, but above all it highlights invisible violence—the violence we do not want to see. I want to push the viewer to take responsibility. Tell them: this exists, and we are complicit, guilty.”
d’Agata’s life is marked by the empathy his images radiate. “As a teenager, I felt the religious pull of monks wandering and immersing themselves in the world’s pain and darkness. Then, at sixteen or seventeen, everything changed. I became a vagrant, an anarchist, a squatter… I fell into heroin, lived among prostitutes, and had no home. I left Marseille for London, then to Latin America. Politics and the intensity of street violence were always tangled in my mind. When I witnessed civil wars in El Salvador or revolutions in Nicaragua, I did not join as a militant; I walked the streets with the people,” he recalls. “Until I was thirty, I didn’t even know what photography was.”
His encounter with the subject emerged when he reached New York and began collaborating with another artist linked to extremism, a photographer and filmmaker named Larry Clark. Today, he has published 62 photo books, and though he says he hates making them, he concedes they are necessary “to carve out my path.” He continues to refine the narrative he wants to tell. It is a political and existential story, because a constant proximity to death is a way of living in his body, a core part of his human condition.
The camera became not only a tool for work, but also a means of relating to the surrounding world; yet his approach isn’t the most common. “For me, photography is not about looking. What matters is where the photo was taken, what the place is. I don’t care about the image itself or who took it. I almost understand it better when I see people taking self-portraits because they use photography to confirm a location, an identity. I argue that photography is not something to be looked at or consumed, but to confirm one’s position in the world.” He adds, “There is nothing psychological about my photographs. I portray a more or less neutral human being who is simply trying to live.”
Whether in the crowded corridors of a pulmonology ward or in the darkest bunkers of Mexico or India, the guiding principle remains the same: “Go where you have not gone and teach what has not been taught.”
In this stance between life and death, the places where d’Agata works are often marginal, conflict zones and hospitals. He has visited Ukraine repeatedly over the past two years. Just before the Covid outbreak, he worked extensively in emergency services on the front lines of that fight: “I shot 13,000 photos in two months, working in hospitals across five French cities. Then I went to document Covid in Brazil and the vaccination campaign in Madrid…” An 800-page book titled Virus emerged from those efforts. In both crowded hospital corridors and the deepest caves of cities in Mexico or India, the philosophy remains the same: “Go where you haven’t been and teach what you don’t know.”
It has been a long time since he made a film, an art form he feels deeply about, even as a spectator. He concentrates on photography, and although he continues to use drugs, he does not record or shoot while under their influence for years at a time. “It makes me sick,” he says, “I am overwhelmed by the incestuous process of filming myself this way.” His base lies in a small room in Paris, yet his life remains truly nomadic, forever on the move. He longs to avoid work commitments to preserve freedom, explaining that days spent at exhibitions or discussions with journalists often feel like a retreat. Every moment spent writing or printing photographs risks betraying the hard, ongoing effort to live that tragic but real life. Listening to him, it becomes clear that his life gains meaning only when the body is placed in those places and among those people, at the zero point of pain. He uses the camera to document the world’s daily suffering, a suffering that continues to multiply.