Antoine D’Agata: Mexico gathers three decades of the French photographer’s encounters with Mexico, from 1986 to 2016. Published by RM in 2017, the book presents a country not as a picturesque destination but as a difficult, unstable social landscape shaped by isolation, violence, addiction, prostitution, and other forms of marginal life. D’Agata’s position is deliberately implicated: rather than observing from a safe distance, he enters the situations he photographs and makes intimacy—sexual, narcotic, and emotional—the basis of his photographic relation to the world.

The book’s force lies in the way it refuses a straightforward travel narrative. Stills, cinematic sequences, and texts are assembled as a personal diary whose atmosphere grows progressively more fractured. Images that might initially appear documentary become unsettled by repetition, abrupt shifts, and a language of visual deterioration. The resulting portrait is tense and inward, less an inventory of Mexican society than a record of the photographer’s passage through a lonely and dangerous reality.

D’Agata structures the volume in six photographic movements, each associated with a different period in Mexico’s contemporary history. These divisions interrupt any smooth sense of historical continuity, while also giving the book a deliberate descent toward pain and savagery. For collectors, this sequencing is central to the work’s significance: Mexico is not simply a selection of photographs but an authored photobook in which design, text, chronology, and psychological intensity determine how the subject is encountered. Its sustained commitment to discomfort places it among the more demanding forms of contemporary photographic bookmaking.

The English-language paperback extends to 201 pages and measures approximately 31.8 by 21.3 centimetres. Its scale allows D’Agata’s images and textual elements to unfold as an extended, cumulative statement rather than as isolated plates. The volume is especially notable for the coherence of its collaboration between photographic record and cinematic, literary construction—a demanding account of place whose meaning emerges through sequence as much as through individual images.