PSYCHODÉMIE is a visual document highlighting the human vulnerability revealed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Completed in Brazil in February 2022, the book consists mainly of thermal images taken in hospital intensive care units, refugee centres and uninhabited public spaces in France during the lockdown months of March to June 2020. It interrogates global social and political dynamics in the context of the pandemic, against the incandescent backdrop of a city confined to its hospitals, where nurses and the virus-stricken sick carry out a daily ritual of gestures of life and death. Antoine d'Agata turns these opaque spaces into a theatre of shadows. He erases the very surface of things, the skin of beings and the skin of the world, the better to reveal its tragic dimension. It is in this ambivalence between solidarity and contamination, this fatality of social and physiological death, that the photographer sought to grasp and affirm, through photographic language, the possibility of unprecedented gestures of resistance that transfigure bodies. The thermal image freezes forms, postures and figures into shapes imperceptible to the naked eye. For some thirty years, Antoine d'Agata has shown the contemporary conditions of a battered humanity. He questions the limits of the photographic process; he does not consider society as a whole in order to document it, but immerses himself in the violence of the world at his own risk and peril. His images are subjective gestures that aim to push the frontiers of visual representation beyond the ordinary conventions of photography.