Anticorps, published in 2013 by Xavier Barral Editeur, is a substantial monograph by Antoine d’Agata, issued in connection with the exhibition of the same name at Le Bal in Paris. Its subject is not nocturnal life observed from a safe distance, but an existence entered through the body: sex, wandering, suffering, drugs, risk, desire, and chance form the conditions of a difficult and lucid autobiographical inquiry.

The book presents photography as inseparable from a way of living. D’Agata places himself within the situations he photographs, treating experience not as background but as the method through which his thinking is produced. The work follows a demanding movement between opposing forces—social alienation and physical solidarity, immorality and the transparency of amorality—without resolving them into a reassuring moral position. Its intensity comes from this sustained exposure to contradiction.

At 560 pages, Anticorps has the scale of an extended record rather than a compact selection. The French-language volume’s breadth suits a practice concerned with accumulation, recurrence, and the pressure of lived time. For collectors, its importance lies in the unusually close alignment between subject, photographic method, and autobiographical stakes: this is a book in which the conditions of making are part of what is being examined. Its connection to a major Paris exhibition also places it within d’Agata’s broader public presentation, while the hardback format gives the project a durable bibliographic presence.

Anticorps is therefore best approached slowly, as a sustained and unsettling investigation rather than a series of isolated images. It records a practice founded on risk, unconsciousness, desire, and chance, and asks what photography can become when the photographer accepts full participation in the world he describes.