Photography Conf / signature Public Talk with Matt Black and Antoine d’Agata

As the closing event of the 5-day Magnum Workshop held at the Capa Center, the talk also features the public presentation of the workshop participants.

The event is held in English.

Matt Black is from California’s Central Valley, an agricultural region in the heart of the state. His work has explored the connections between migration, poverty, agriculture, and the environment in his native rural California and in southern Mexico.

For his ongoing project The Geography of Poverty, Matt Black travelled 48,000 miles across 44 States to photograph designated ‘poverty areas’ and highlight the growing gap between rich and poor. The work was presented as an interactive, digital package by MSNBC, with Black’s images geotagged to a map of the US. Matt Black was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Prize in 2015 for the project. He also received the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in 2016 and was named Senior Fellow at the Emerson Collective. Other recent works include The Dry Land, highlighting the impact of drought on California’s agricultural communities, and The Monster in the Mountains, focusing on the disappearance of 43 students in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. Both of these projects, accompanied by short films, were published by The New
Yorker.

Born in Marseilles, Antoine d’Agata left France in 1983 and remained overseas for the next ten years. Finding himself in New York in 1990, he pursued an interest in photography by taking courses at the International Center of Photography, where his teachers included Larry Clark and Nan Goldin.

For his first books of photographs, De Mala Muerte and Male Noche, d’Agata travelled the world to document characters of the night’s further edges: for sex workers, addicts, war-torn communities and homeless. The books were published in 1998.

In 2001, he published Hometown and won the Niépce Prize for young photographers. Compiling intimate and provocative images, the book focused on his travels in France and personal journey.
Traveling around the world, documenting his personal experiences and encounters, d’Agata continued to publish regularly: Vortex and Insomnia appeared in 2003, accompanying his exhibition 1001 Nuits, which opened in Paris in September; Stigma was published in 2004, and Manifeste in 2005. Since 2005 Antoine d’Agata has had no settled place of residence but has worked around the world.

Both of Matt Black and Antoine d’Agata use the photographic object as a tool to engage with the world. With their intimate relationship to the medium, both are able to visualise the complexities of reality through innovative and contemporary approaches. Through their authentic interpretations of reality, audiences are able to experience a political world that is both familiar and completely outside of their own.

Matt Black and Antoine d’Agata will be in conversation, discussing their practice and photography, in a public event held in the Capa Center on the night of the 29th of September. The talk will be the closure of a 5-day Masterclass at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, working alongside 26 students.