©Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Studio Diptych with Gazing Ball (_DSF5808, _DSF5811), 2024. Diptych, 19 x 24 inches each. From TRANCE

The orbit and arc of Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s aesthetic trajectory has steadily tracked across my social media feeds over the last few years. For instance, Sepuya is the juror for this year’s La Jolla Athenaeum 34th Annual Juried Exhibition, which is near the university where he teaches in San Diego, California. He also lives in Los Angeles, where he is represented by Vielmetter Gallery. Known for his earlier bodies of work, Aperture describes the 2024 publication of Dark Room A-Z in the following ways: “Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s photography is grounded in a collaborative, rhizomatic approach to studio practice and portraiture. This volume unpacks his Dark Room series (2016–21), offering a deep dive into the thick network of references and the interconnected community of artists and subjects that Sepuya has interwoven throughout the images. The excavation and mapping of intellectual and artistic data points across the artist’s work is presented through […] a comprehensive cross-referencing of conceptual categories.”

Against the backdrop of his recent exhibition at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Germany, the second survey since his 2019 show (of 2006-2018 work) at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri, it seemed like a good time to ask the artist about his practice and how it dovetails with community.

Please tell us your name, where you are from, where you work, etc.

My name is Paul Mpagi Sepuya and I was born and grew up in San Bernardino, CA. Just east of Los Angeles. I lived in New York from 2000 to 2014, and then returned to Los Angeles, where I currently live and work. But I have a day job in La Jolla, where I’m a professor in the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego. I just moved out of a studio building that I have been working in for the past ten years. This also is important because all of the work from the past decade in the related DARK ROOM projects has come to an end. I don’t know what’s next, but I have moved to a new, smaller studio near where I live in central Los Angeles. I trust it’ll take a year to settle in…

In what medium or media do you work (e.g., photography, sculpture, performance, etc.)?

I’ve always worked primarily in photography, with some projects in zine-making, bookmaking, photo-collage, and a few sculptures.

Describe your practice (e.g., conceptual, activist, curatorial, interdisciplinary, etc.), and when did you get started?

I’m an artist who makes photographs and related collage and, in the past, zine works. I did make some photo-sculptures in 2023-2025. I began making photographs in high school around 1998, and studied photography in college at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Photography and Imaging Department, 2000-2004. So I suppose I got started somewhere in there, but I would consider my first work that I’d be comfortable showing now, to be portraits made beginning in 2005.

©Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Darkroom Mirror (0X5A1531), 2017, pigment print, 34 x 51 inches. From DARK ROOM

In what directions have your projects evolved over time?

My projects have evolved in unexpected ways that I could not have anticipated. I began making portraits because I wanted to get to know, and to hold onto, various relationships and friendships when I was younger, and that has not stopped. But it has changed. The first portrait project created problems that shifted my perspective and introduced new questions, that became the next project. And so forth. And so it has gone. I try to respond in creative ways, and I do not plan projects that are then executed.

What types of investigations, methods and subject matter does your work explore?

I came to realize that my work is about the processes and complications from the production of portraiture in queer and homoerotic economies of exchange, and then became more and more about the medium of photography itself. Through all of this, I’ve pushed and questioned what it means to make a “black” image in unexpected ways, and how to approach the difficulty of eroticism and sex in photography that I want to be in conversation with broader subjects.

©Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Studio Mirror Position (_DSF7634), 2024, 18 x 24 inches. From TRANCE

Within which communities do you identify, and what audiences do you have in mind when producing work?

I think about my community of friends and that’s the only audience I can think of. Otherwise, I would be too shy to make anything. The equation changes when it comes to exhibition, but I have to start with myself in the process of making.

How long do your projects usually take?

Pictures and ideas develop into projects or bodies of work in their own time. I tend to have a larger “project” that’s made up of several or many interrelated bodies of work, that are articulated over several exhibitions. For example, DARK ROOM.

What level of visual literacy and art historical knowledge would you say is useful in understanding or appreciating your work?

I think it’s good to have a sense of 1990s pop and music culture as well as 1970s-2000s gay porn to get a context for my early portraits. The stripped down directness to them was a response I think, in 2005, to a kind of hyper production that I was drawn to as a teenager. It’s good to know the queer zine landscape of the aughts to get another sense of the community of friends and collaborators, and to understand the turn my work took around 2013, the big conceptual photography moment of the 2000s to about 2015. I really wanted to turn the “magic” of photography into a way of visualizing and representing queer experience and play. The Dark Room project with its mirrors was me wanting to engage in an explicitly erotic and hard-to-control way with Michael Fried’s arguments about absorption and theatricality. [Note: Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Michael Fried, 1976.] But all of this is still very much complimented by what viewers bring to the work in unexpected ways.

©Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Daylight Studio (0X5A4718) [S13-03], 2022, salt print, 11 x 14 inches. From Daylight Studio / Dark Room Studio

Both BUTT and my SHOOT zine emerged with the 2000s internet. My zine pointed to my website and blog, BUTT had their friendster-style magazine social media site. So yes, they both pointed toward community out there somewhere, if you didn’t know us/them. Many friends and collaborators were formed in those and intersecting spaces. I started making the zines in 2005 because I wanted to have fun. They were affordable, accessible, and felt special to make and people were excited to find them. My zines were very unelaborated, which I didn’t appreciate as a stand-out characteristic at the time. But I had a website long before I made zines. Since probably 1997, and I was also making and sharing photo prints with friends simultaneously. Digital media didn’t change my approach to zine-making. It was no longer having the time, with demands shifting to making and exhibiting prints. I keep thinking how nice it would be to get back to photo-copy machine zines. Now everything is professionally printed. I’m not sure if those are zines, even though I’ve made them.

Has the way your work circulates affected its cultural position and placement, or your methods?

I share much less of what I make, and hold work back but much longer than I did years ago. I made physical zines but as I mentioned earlier, I also scanned and posted on my website and WordPress blog almost every photograph I printed. Now I share very little work, maybe in the single digit percentage, preferring to only make available what is physically in exhibition.

©Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Daylight Studio (0X5A6854), 2022, 18 x 24 inches. from Daylight Studio / Dark Room Studio

Some of the descriptions of your exhibitions also bring to mind the pleasant sense of vertigo that I experience as a viewer in the middle of a Wolfgang Tillmans installation, in terms of how scale and sight lines make me question dimensions of where I am viscerally standing. Are curatorial strategies like these at play at different stages in your work?

Absolutely. I’ve heard Tillmans talk about his exhibition installation process and it’s fascinating to me because it’s so detailed. Of course things change, but it begins with a detailed process. I realize I can really only work with a sense of total volume of pictures and space, and then trust that there is enough nested information within the pictures that these relationships will be fun to re-encounter in the installation process. Sight lines between works, where subjects or fragments or different instances appear and re-appear, or an object that carries along across years, or accidental mirroring between pictures…

So yes, it’s in the work at different stages while making the work, anticipating its presentation, then re-discovered through attentiveness in the space of exhibition during installation. A lot of this information I’ve realized is something that only I see, or I tune into it because I have the narrative information that a viewer or curator does not have. But then when it comes together, it becomes tangible to others in the space.

©Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Mirror Study (0X5A6571), 2018. 34 x 51 inches. From Mirror Studies

How does your current survey exhibition at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover personally compare to your 2019 survey (of 2006-2018 work) at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis—in terms of dialog around subject and object relations, facets of the gaze, hunches, investigations, and historicity?

The CAM St. Louis show was the first big presentation of the DARK ROOM project, which at the time was about three years in. I had made a significant amount of work in the interconnected series there, and it was anchored by earlier projects—portraits, zines, Studio Museum residency work. But it really felt like a work laying out possibilities of what was to come. The historicity of this new exhibition is overwhelming, honestly, because it’s coincided with moving on. I wanted to make an argument with the first show that my UCLA Thesis work and the new Dark Room series emerged from a deeper investment and community, when there were some upsetting moments trying to frame those as my “first” exhibitions and first works. I had been making work for 15 years at that point. Focus. Desire. is an exhibition of what I have done, and opens up space for me to not know yet what comes next.

[Sprengel Museum’s press release describes the show: From July 1 through October 4, 2026, the Sprengel Museum Hannover presents “Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Focus. Desire,” the first major solo museum exhibition in Germany dedicated to the work of American photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya… Developed in collaboration with Fotomuseum Winterthur, the exhibition brings together early and recent bodies of work alongside materials from the artist’s personal archive. Curator Stefan Gronert explains: “In Sepuya’s work, the image does not emerge from a singular gaze or a fixed perspective, but from relationships—between bodies, camera, space, mirrors, and ultimately the viewer. It is these connections that bring the image into being in the first place.”]

Aspects of hide and seek, performance and narrativity, cruising and mirroring, etc. elicits an experience of yearning and give-and-take, for me, in viewing various bodies of your work. How conscious are you of these considerations while you’re in the process of making the work?

These are definitely at the forefront, and are a big part of that process. I would have to think about what something like “cruising” might look like if translated to a photograph structurally and compositionally, and then balance that setup with something completely unpredictable and dynamic. It’s a pleasurable and extended and sometimes head-trippy process. To think formally is to be outside of the picture, and to produce the work, there has to be a letting go and being present in excess..

©Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Night Studio Mirror (DSF1073), 2024, dye-sublimation on aluminum in aluminum artist frame, 19.5 x 24.5 inches. From TRANCE

Unless noted, all works pigment prints. All works courtesy the artist, Vielmetter Los Angeles, DOCUMENT, Chicago, Bortolami, New York, and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich and Paris.