Published by Prestel in 2014, Antoine d’Agata’s Antibodies gathers photographs concerned with lives pushed beyond the limits of social visibility. Its subjects include sex workers, people living with addiction, homeless individuals, and communities marked by war. The book does not treat these conditions as an orderly social survey; instead, it brings them together as recurring sites of suffering, violence, exposure, and endurance within d’Agata’s work.

The volume draws from several photographic series rather than presenting a single, self-contained project. Images are punctuated by short texts, essays, and commentary, creating a structure in which photographs are repeatedly interrupted, reframed, and placed in relation to language. Across 560 pages, this accumulation allows motifs and circumstances to echo across different places. The scale is important: repetition becomes part of the book’s argument, resisting the reduction of marginalized lives to a few representative pictures.

D’Agata’s subject matter is difficult, and Antibodies offers no comfortable distance from it. Bodies, precarious environments, and states of extremity form the book’s persistent terrain. Yet its significance lies not simply in the severity of what is shown, but in the editorial decision to assemble distinct bodies of work into a sustained, densely layered account. The accompanying writing gives the photographs a discursive setting without converting them into straightforward illustrations of a thesis.

For a collector, Antibodies merits attention as a substantial monographic synthesis: a hardcover publication that makes the relationship among d’Agata’s separate series, recurring subjects, and textual contexts available for close reading. Its interest rests in that architecture—the long sequence, the controlled interruptions, and the cumulative pressure of images—making the book itself, rather than any isolated photograph, the principal form of the work.