Ice

...Antoine D'Agata's "Ice". Recapitulates and extends "Agonie", his previous album in the same vein. Feverish, non-stop "sex-cum-drug session" photographs that are interspersed with text mostly in French and some English: Emails, excerpts culled from other writers (notably, William T. Vollmann, another sex-cum-drug addiction exemplar), and most poignantly, the full transcripts of D'Agata's conversations with Ka, his Vietnamese sex partner and lover. "Ice" is, of course, metamphetamine, "crystal meth". "A disturbing testimony, showing the commitment of a photographer documenting drug-generated fictions. In December 2007, Antoine D'Agata arrives in Phnom Penh and falls in love with Ka, a Vietnamese prostitute, and a dealer also. In January 2008, they begin to share a small and dirty flat downtown. Here starts the oblivion. The addiction to methamphetamine takes over the photographic work and the frontiers between fiction and reality start to melt" (Publisher's blurb). Antoine D'Agata's painterly photographs recall both the agony of Francis Bacon's grossly distorted figures and the delirium of Pierre Molinier's self-portraits. A member of Magnum, D'Agata's evocation of "49% pain/51% pleasure" could not be more worlds apart from the documentary style identified with the agency. "It's not how a photographer looks at the world that is important. It's his intimate relationship with it source;www.abebooks.com