Photobook Library

These scores use the legacy monthly asking-price aggregate. They do not use the new exact-edition, condition, completeness, and destination-shipping rules.

Description

Published by The Eyes Publishing in 2020, Antoine d’Agata, Francis Bacon places 27 photographs by d’Agata in sustained relation to 25 graphic works by Francis Bacon. Its subject is therefore not simply either artist in isolation, but the possibilities opened by bringing photography and graphic art into direct confrontation. The pairing proposes an aesthetic parallel between a contemporary photographic practice and Bacon’s expressionist art without collapsing their distinct media into one another.

The publication’s defining editorial device is its double-book construction. Two volumes are bound together so that the works can be viewed side by side, allowing readers to make their own correspondences across the paired sequences. This arrangement turns comparison into a physical act: attention moves between images rather than following a single, predetermined line of argument. Repetition, difference and visual tension emerge through proximity.

Across 96 pages, the book maintains a concentrated scale. The numerical balance between the two bodies of work is close enough to sustain an extended exchange, while the format resists presenting Bacon merely as an explanatory reference for d’Agata. Instead, each artist’s work remains present as an independent visual language within a deliberately constructed encounter. The bilingual French-English edition further situates the project as both an artist’s book and a comparative editorial proposition.

For a photobook collection, its significance lies in this precise conjunction of subject and design. It offers a focused example of how book structure can produce art-historical comparison without relying solely on accompanying argument: binding, sequencing and simultaneous viewing perform much of the interpretive work. Collectors attentive to cross-medium dialogues, or to photobooks in which physical organization is integral to meaning, will find the publication especially worthy of close study.