Index

Index turns the A7 between Paris and Marseille into a confessional, with the rest areas as stations and the family history surfacing mile by mile.

The book runs 1,215 small colour photographs across 256 pages at 13.5 by 18 cm, most of them made at night in lay-bys, service stations and cabs, against wide margins of white page that carry d'Agata's journal and letters. Other voices cut in: parents, women, the CB radio of the truckers. The countryside is treated as an extension of the body and the highway as a mirror in which the photographer sees his own path and his forebears' repeating. Parts of the work were shown in S'il y a lieu je pars avec vous at Le Bal, Paris, in autumn 2014; André Frère Éditions published the complete work that December, co-edited with D.Books, in French.

D'Agata (born 1961, Marseille) studied with Larry Clark and Nan Goldin and has been a member of Magnum Photos since 2004. His books, from Mala Noche and Insomnia to Anticorps, are made from the inside of the situations they record, and Index applies that method to the road home.