Codex-México. 1986/2016

Over the past 30 years, French photographer Antoine d´Agata (born 1961) has undertaken various journeys in Mexico. As a photographer, d´Agata tends to focus on societal taboos like addiction and prostitution, and embroil himself directly in these darker parts of human nature. "It´s not how photographers look at the world that is important," d´Agata has remarked. "It´s their intimate relationship with it." This book is a record of the photographer´s Mexican travels, a tense, immobile diary of his experiences in the devastated landscapes of an increasingly volatile criminal society. Still images, cinematographic narratives and texts make up a personal diary that, through intimate, sexual and narcotic encounters, constructs an increasingly sickening reality. Mirroring his journey as he wanders through a lonely and marginal world, d´Agata´s photographic language seems to fracture and degenerate page by page. As a whole, Mexico presents a complex, difficult portrait of a period that has been constructed as a time of lawlessness and criminality in Mexican society. D´Agata structures the book around six photographic movements, relating directly to different times in the contemporary history of Mexico. These chapters suggest ruptures in the continuity of history, even as D´Agata creates a narrative of descent into pain and savagery.