Antoine d’Agata’s Atlas, published by Textuel in 2016, is a photographic book shaped by encounters with prostitutes across a wide geography, from Cambodia and Cuba to India, Norway, Mexico, and Japan. Its subject is not presented as distant social observation. The description of the book places the photographer within the women’s nights, drugs, and lived experience, recording both their gestures and their words.

The book is built around monologues: each of its twenty chapters is devoted to one woman, giving spoken testimony a structural role in the sequence. This emphasis on voice makes Atlas more than a collection of images. The photographs register traces of intense experience, while the accompanying words carry a beauty described as dense and painful. Together, image and testimony establish a difficult proximity, attentive to individual presence rather than reducing its subjects to a single category.

D’Agata’s method is also distinctly serial. The book constructs tableaux from sequences of images, allowing repetition, accumulation, and variation to shape its emotional force. Its twenty-chapter structure and unusual format—described as proportioned like a cinema screen—give the work a measured architecture, even as its material is unstable, nocturnal, and extreme. The result is a book whose form is inseparable from its ethical and visual approach.

For collectors, Atlas deserves attention as a substantial 2016 monograph that brings together a sustained photographic project, first-person voices, and an explicitly structured design. The French-language hardcover contains 190 pages and measures approximately 32.4 by 18.7 by 2.6 centimetres. Published in connection with the exhibition at Galerie des Filles du Calvaire in Paris, it preserves a particular encounter between contemporary photography, testimony, and bookmaking.