“I am not sure I’ll ever have the strength to make myself understood in a clear and coherent way. I came late to photography as a desperate attempt to stay alive, and I don’t have the discipline or energy to always make sense in the way I try to communicate my understanding of things. My books are careless and full of flaws, my images are messy and my writing is awkward. But all these are just tools, not quite assimilated yet, in an absolutely determined search, that allows no concession or compromise. It is difficult to be as excessive as I am in my work and be completely efficient. Every book, every exhibition, every assignment is just one more small compromise I have to accept. Mistakes are my only possible way, but my route is my own.”
Actually what is most troubling about D’Agata’s work is not specifically its content, but the rather trite assumption that life as a drug-addicted prostitute (in some conveniently distant place) contains more “truth” than that of, say, a suburban housewife or a plumber, and this is simply not the case. It remains a tiresome (if quite familiar) misapprehension that extremes of living can bring us closer to the most fundamental aspects of what it is to be human – as though there were no other kinds of truth. The “reality” that he frames as somehow being an existential crisis is in fact an economic one, so his rhetoric is more like a transparent pretext for the way he has chosen to aestheticise what he photographs – a denial of his implied privilege. Yet for all that I really can’t ignore the power (and yes, even the worth) of what he has achieved as a photographer – it is beautiful and often daring, just not in the ways that he would have us believe.
You can read the rest of the interview here.
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