Renato D’Agostin was born and raised in Venice, Italy, “where for most people photography in those days meant weddings and passport pictures,” he says. Yet the city did manage to nurture his future career, if only inadvertently so: After falling in love with a photograph of an elephant that his mother won in a town prize drawing, he commandeered his father’s Nikon, signed up for a local photography class, and spent his teenage years documenting scenes from everyday Venetian life, a process he’s hewed towards ever since. Still, he considers his first foray away from home in 2002, on a road trip through the capitals of Western Europe, to be his most formative experience. “I took that trip to see if interpreting reality was what I really wanted to do,” D’Agostin recalls. “From that moment on, I never had any doubt. I felt like traveling was the place where I wanted to live, and the camera was my extension.”
After leaving Milan’s Italian Institute of Photography and moving to New York three years later, one of his first shows was Metropolis at Leica Gallery, comprising mostly black-and-white images he’d taken on that trip and a few others; he’s since become known for projects that involve researching a place, traveling there, then walking its streets to stake out the kinds of minimalist, fragmentary details that provide a visceral feeling of what it’s like to live there. “I had people at my opening in Tokyo saying I’ve been here for 70 years and this is the first time I’ve seen Tokyo represented like Tokyo,” D’Agostin says. “You don’t see the streets there. You don’t see anything.” Each place — from Tokyo to Shanghai, Mount Etna, and Venice (revisited) — becomes not only an exhibition, but an obsessively curated large-format book, a method most likely inspired by D’Agostin’s time working as an assistant to Ralph Gibson early in his career. (Gibson also taught him “the percentages of tonalities that make a print a great print, and how important it is to study your own work,” he says.)
It was one of those books that inspired this studio visit, in fact. While visiting SU contributor Brian Ferry’s house last year, we happened to pull Tokyo Untitled off the shelf with curiosity, having remembered meeting D’Agostin at an Apartamento party years earlier; it turned out he was one of Ferry’s favorite photographers, and the two had been in touch over email. The three of us ended up spending several hours together eating pizza, drinking wine, and observing D’Agostin’s darkroom process in his Chinatown studio last spring, followed by a recent follow-up visit Ferry paid to his brand new space in Brooklyn. The slideshow at right documents both visits, plus the contents of several conversations over the past year, to offer a glimpse into D’Agostin’s unique take on image-making.
D’Agostin in his brand new studio in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood, sitting atop his BMW R100. “It’s from 1983 — like me!” he says. Behind him is a photograph of a man riding a bicycle in Shanghai, to which he paid three different 10-day visits last year for a book that’s coming out soon. D’Agostin only shoots film and only in black and white, making most of his prints himself in his studio darkroom.
The three prints to the right of the motorcycle depict semi-abstract details from his hometown of Venice, which he returned to in 2011 for his book The Beautiful Cliché. “Thanks to an overload of tourism, the imagery of Venice has been reduced to such stereotypical pictures of the city,” he says. “I wanted somehow to find that lost magical side of the beautiful lagoon city, where silence and time are still precious. You don’t actually see much of Venice in these photos, but that’s what I like — the challenge of representing something without showing it.”
D’Agostin in his studio kitchen. Above him is a dot painting by Pierrette Bloch, for which he once traded an entire series of his photographs, and on the upper right is an image we jokingly christened “the flying fennel” during our visit. It’s from his upcoming book on acrobats in Shanghai, which he shot for only one hour on one roll of film. “That’s the beauty of photography — you can’t repeat these moments,” he says. “You have to anticipate everything. A fraction of a second later, and I wouldn’t have been able to see his feet behind his body. Here you can see his muscles, and his extreme strength.”
A wall of photos in D’Agostin’s new studio, from some of his first to some of his most recent. “The large one of the walking man represents the beginning of my vision,” he says. “I waited for the right person to intersect with all these shapes to form the correct architecture and tension. When I put it in the enlarger for the first time in 2005, I knew it was the direction I wanted to go in. A print of that photograph has just been added to the collection of the Library of Congress this month.”
“From the bottom left: A curtain from the Tokyo Untitled book, a ZooYork skateboard with a photograph by Alessandro Simonetti, a man reflected in a mirror from The Beautiful Cliché, me and curator Italo Zannier at the presentation of my Venice book, and a print from Daido Moriyama’s 1968 book Japan: A Photo Theater. On the bookshelf are my cameras: Leica M6 and M7, Nikon F100, and a Nizo super-8mm.”
Various portraits of D’Agostin taken by friends and lovers. “My wall of memories,” he says.
On a table in the new studio, all of the books D’Agostin’s published so far: Tokyo Untitled, The Beautiful Cliché, A day with Lucia, Metropolis, and Etna — his most recent — as well as the upcoming Acrobats and Shanghai projects.
“When I started photography, my only way to access the world I was falling in love with was through books,” he says. “Exhibitions were a rarity in my hometown, so I got in touch with photography through paper. Making books has since become an essential part of my process. I believe books embody the whole idea behind the project: A show will change based on the space, the curator, the light, the size of prints, and the audience, while a book will always be seen at the same distance from the eyes of the viewer, and always in the same sequence, reflecting the project the way the photographer conceived it.”
A spread from D’Agostin’s latest book, Etna, featuring the poem “Sequenza e Fuga” by Luigi Cerantola. He visited Mount Etna with his girlfriend in 2012. “We spent hours walking around this incredible black desert,” he says. “Differently from how I shoot in a city context, where I compress layers, on the Etna I worked on distance and extension. Matter and texture became a strong part of the visual experience, with smoke and clouds wrapping up tourists that were walking around or moving around the surface in little vans, like explorers of a remote planet.”
Etna is the first in a series of books he’s begun about single subjects, called Nomadic Editions, which includes an upcoming project on Cappadocia, Turkey, and the acrobats book shown here. “Differently from the cities I explore, where I analyze the components that build their DNA, in this series I’m interested in seeing what first impression of a place or event can come from my senses, almost like a tourist would experience it,” he says.
To make each of his books, says D’Agostin, he first pins all of the photographs up on a wall; shown here are images from his Shanghai project, hanging in his old Chinatown studio this spring. “I try to find the relationship between the first and last page, then I arrange all the other ones,” he says. “I make a prototype, looking for tension between the images.”
“In an era of scrolling up or down on screens, I find turning a page is still one of the most exciting things to do.”
“Somehow I find that making books is like composing music: Every element has to fall into the right place at the right moment, building a visual dialogue between images,” D’Agostin continues. “Every photograph has to stand on its own, and at the same time coexist with the ones before and after it. The great composer Arvo Pärt once said that he composes so that every blade of grass would be as important as a flower. In a way, that’s how I try to approach a new book.”
A cluster of invitations on the door to D’Agostin’s old studio. Near the top right is an invite to a lecture he once gave in New York about his powerful experience teaching photography at a psychiatric hospital in Paris for people with eating disorders. “It was the most difficult challenge and the most beautiful experience I could have with photography,” he says. He actually shot this image of an emaciated French man taking his children to the public pool the day before he was set to begin teaching the class. It gave him goosebumps.
During our visit to his old studio, D’Agostin gave us a quick demonstration of his darkroom techniques, which are a huge part of his overall process — typically minus the “delicious pizza,” of course. “I like the idea that the photograph is not finished when I shut the camera,” he says. “I like to know that I can still work on it. It’s like a painting or a sculpture — it’s like sculpting marble. You can do so much with the image in the darkroom.”
D’Agostin loading a negative into the enlarger, containing an image of a pyramid of Shanghai acrobats. “This is considered a pretty hard one, because it’s all about the way that the bodies pop out from the black,” he says. “It’s very, very tricky.” He’s also a perfectionist, and can spend days in the studio going through dozens of sheets of photo paper before he makes a print that’s good enough to sell or exhibit. Ours, of course, would just be a quick test print.
Choosing a filter for the exposure. “This enlarger is from 1954,” D’Agostin notes. “It’s the kind I used in Ralph Gibson’s darkroom. He got it from Robert Frank. Larry Clark printed everything on this kind as well. When I started working with Ralph, I bought this one online, because nobody wants it. It’s the most amazing enlarger.”
“I find the darkroom to be the natural extension of the light,” he says. “When you’re under the enlarger you’re working in direct contact with it, modeling it with your hands, finding the balance between tonalities, arranging them through your fingers and feeling the weight of the light.”
D’Agostin using a wand with a small piece of paper attached to shield areas of the image while he burns in other areas. Dealing with the intricate edges of those areas is the most maddening part of making any print. “You can go on like this for days,” he says. “When you work in high contrast, it’s more tolerable, but when you work on very low values of grays, there you go crazy, crazy.”
“In the moment the photograph starts to appear from the first bath, I feel the closest connection to the subject I photographed,” says D’Agostin.
“In the darkroom there’s a sort of respect for the materials,” he adds. “You work together with them to get the subtle nuances that will make a print a photograph. It becomes a meditative place in which to study your own work.”
The final acrobat test-print, which looked good to us but was nowhere near perfect in D’Agostin’s eyes. “That’s the beauty of the darkroom though, the manual element,” he explains. “There’s a little spot there, but you accept it. There’s that 2% of gray that you could keep going on for a year, trying to get it right. You have to be tolerant and you have to accept the mystic. Then sometimes you get the print that’s perfect in your eyes, and that’s when you don’t sell it. That’s when you keep it in your collection.”
D’Agostin’s Acrobats book comes out this spring, but in the meantime, you can follow this link to pick up a copy of his new book on Mount Etna.
It all started with the pistol, if only because it was “the simplest to do,” says photographer Adam Voorhes. He first studied the gun, looking for ways to segment it, then he took it apart so that its innards were exposed, right down to the bullet casings. “Some objects can be separated like a technical drawing, while others look more organic, like a football helmet with its straps weaving in and out,” he says. The pistol was squarely in the former camp. He took its disassembled parts and built a kind of 3-D installation, each part hanging from a fishing line in proximity, so that the gun would appear to have exploded in mid-air, a bit like the artist Damián Ortega’s axonometric Beetle or this iconic ad from the ’60s. The wires could be erased in Photoshop once Voorhes got the final shot. After the pistol he’d do an Etch-a-Sketch, and an old-school telephone, turning the studio experiments into his best-known series and then selling commercial clients like ESPN and Spirit magazine on the technique. This is how Voorhes works — he is a commercial photographer. He’s not interested in gallery shows. He tests ideas, and then he sells them.
If photographer Brian W. Ferry shoots like he takes absolutely nothing for granted — making us pine hard for moments of intensely quiet, understated beauty that probably already exist in our everyday lives — it’s likely because he feels so grateful to be doing what he’s doing. He may have discovered his inner camera nerd way back when he was growing up in Connecticut, but just a few short years ago, he was working long hours as a corporate lawyer in London, taking pictures merely as a personal creative escape hatch. Only after his blog began delivering fans and potential clients to his digital doorstep did he gather the resolve to quit his job, move to Brooklyn, and make a career out of triggering in people a kind of strange, misplaced nostalgia. “I think a lot about taking photos that are about more than capturing something beautiful, that have a heaviness attached to them,” Ferry told us earlier this winter at his Fort Greene garden apartment, as we rifled through his belongings together.
In a recent interview with the New York–based photographer Tim Barber, who's known for his edgy portraits of artists and other downtown tastemakers, the folks behind the Urban Outfitters blog evoked some rather unconventional subject matter: UFOs, ghosts, chicken carcasses. Credit the fact that not only did the former Vice Magazine photo editor shoot UO's playful new spring catalog, but he's also currently judging a Weirdest Photo Contest for the retail giant. Of course, in his work with clients like Nike, Woolrich Woolen Mills, T magazine, Italian Vogue, and Stella McCartney, Barber has displayed a more serious side as well. We wanted to show both of them, so we went through his portfolio and chose some new photos to accompany our excerpt from the UO interview — instances where Barber has documented the private spaces of creatives, a la Sight Unseen.
