Strange Fire

Q&A: Paul Mpagi Sepuya

By Giancarlo Montes Santangelo | November 21, 2019

“Alex knew he had never seen a more perfect being…his body was all symmetry and music…and Alex called him Beauty…long they lay…blowing smoke and exchanging thoughts…and Alex swallowed with difficulty…he felt a glow of tremor…and they talked and…slept… Alex wondered more and more why he liked Adrian so…he liked many people…Wallie…Zora…Clement…Gloria…Langston…John… Gwenny…oh many people…and they were friends…but Beauty…it was different…once Alex had admired Beauty’s strength…and Beauty’s eyes had grown soft and he had said…I like you more than anyone Dulce…Adrian always called him Dulce…and Alex had become confused…was it that he was so susceptible to beauty that Alex liked Adrian so much…but no…he knew other people who were beautiful…Fania and Gloria…Monty and Bunny…but he was never confused before them…while Beauty…Beauty could make him believe in Buddha…or imps…and no one else could do that…that is no one but Melva…but then he was in love with Melva…and that explained that…he would like Beauty to know Melva…they were both so perfect…” (“Smoke, Lilies and Jade.”, Richard Bruce Nugent, 1926)

Richard Bruce Nugent's stream of consciousness details the sort of visceral desire that naturally overflows in real time, and he maps this desire through a network of relationships made through and in the Harlem Renaissance. The city serves as a moving ground through which friends and lovers pass; Alex, Beauty, Adrian, Wallie, Zora, Clements, Gloria....  “Smoke, Lilies and Jade.” traces a network that moves through Harlem and  the intimate personal relationships that make the writing possible.

Nugent's focus on the power of desire and the elliptic nature of tracing relationships provided new ground for Paul Mpagi Sepuya to consider as he started making photographs of lovers and friends between the end of 2004 and early 2005.

Sepuya contends with the impulse to use the camera as a tool directed towards lucidly knowing. The unfolding magnitude of a single person or relationship is nearly impossible to write into one photograph. However, Sepuya works with this dilemma - the obscuring of the intimate relationships that make a photograph possible, as it enters a public space. In our conversation he notes that these fissures “ended up transforming us in unanticipated ways, and producing another set of relations”. An expanded social grew, read possible by proximity to the event itself.  

Giancarlo Montes Santangelo (GMS): I spotted one of your photographs on Scruff! I chatted with the guy but have no idea what his name is. I thought you’d appreciate the afterlife of the picture. It’s telling though, the images and the relationships they bind are slippery.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (PMS): Ah I love that story. It happens a lot. I don’t know yet if any other friends who’ve made their way into portraits have been in South Africa besides you. But I’ve heard stories of friends being across various continents and initiation conversations (both in person and on apps) based on recognition from the photographs.


GMS: Something you mentioned when we first met was that at some point you began to only photograph people that had some sort of investment in the project. Can you talk about that shift and what that yielded? Given the importance of there being relationships that exist prior to and beyond the photograph, are the particulars of these exchanges manifesting in the work of any interest to you?

PMS: Another friend recently asked if I’m sentimental, or something to that effect, when it comes to photographs. And I think that’s a part of it. But sentimentality in art is usually about the manipulation of the audience through emotion, sadness, nostalgia in an indulgent way. And I’m interested in something possibly the opposite. It’s negotiating that private experience in the public presentation of work that is quite formal and, unless the viewer is friends with me or another subject of the work, does my sentimentality about so-and-so portrait even matter?

But I think I’m on a tangent there. I tried to stop photographing people who were only interested in a transactional experience rather than friendship, or like you said, ideally those who have a similar investment in the work and an ongoing conversation. Between the end of 2004 and early 2005 I began by stopping photographing art school models and focusing on self portraits, and portraits of friends I was getting to know and several people I had dated or fallen for and wanted to reconnect with. It was about saying however directly as I could that the bringing of the camera was about trying to “know” something about who we were to each other. That is a fiction of course, and I realized that the making of the portraits ended up transforming us in unanticipated ways, and producing another set of relations that came from the growing notoriety of the work through zines and online; because of how the portraits were used and through those encounters you started off by mentioning. 

That's why I ended up hanging on to Cecil Beaton's 1984 dust jacket portrait, and Richard Bruce Nugent's “Smoke, Lilies and Jade.” They were historical examples to help me make sense of image circulation, teasing desire, and the naming of names in the artist's circle moving outwards.

GMS: The friction between the private photographic encounter and the presentation of the images seem to be doing something though. It feels like a kind of bubble:

 My first impression is that the portraits index relationships, touches, conversations that happen in and around the photographic event, the actual taking of the picture. That excess, the “invisible”, becomes visible if/when the viewer is inside the set of relationships you create, whether by knowing you personally, knowing the subject, or just being familiar with your practice. I'd say that the sentimentality about so-and-so portrait matters to those that can read it because of their proximity to your larger practice. At that point the “familiar-viewer” is hailed into some sort of sentimentality. As someone who has been photographed by you, the excess I'm describing comes into how I look at the images. I imagine the comfort, the conversation, the laughter etc. that surrounds the process.

In that way, the pictures create this bubble, that most viewers, especially museum or gallery visitors, aren't a part of. I think you could say this about any body of work, “I know the subject” sort of reaction or “I know the photographer”, though I think there's more at stake when the set of relationships are definitively queer. The queer bubble expands in the institution. It's fitting that you mention those works! They both make explicit the things that become invisible in your own work. I've gone on a tangent about the potential of the sentimentality you mentioned, but is the experience of the familiar viewer of importance to you at all?

PMS:  Aha, discoveries.

The way you describe the indexing around the event, the image, and it’s invisible (or apparent) excess based on proximity (inside v.s. outside) is everything I am thinking about when making the work. It’s what was inevitable and inescapable as content. It could be dealt with or ignored. Proximity in a way has become the subject of much of this work. The “familiar-viewer”! I love that term, did you come up with it? It’s something I want to continue to use and think about. Thank you for that.

GMS: Ha! Yea it seems like a fitting term. I might be thinking a bit too much in black and white but what do you make of the friction between portraits  (the bodies, the desire, the touch, the gazes) and the institutional space?

PMS: It’s only recently that the portraits (images of the full body) have been exhibited in institutional spaces. They have been shown in small group shows since the beginning, especially between 2005 and 2011, then faded from interest. As the newer “fragmented” work got attention, the bodies re-entered into being exhibited. But it really has only been since the Team Gallery exhibition this Spring and the current Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis survey of work that the portraits both older and recent have been given equal weight with the mirror studies and other pictures. So I’m still figuring out my response to seeing them exhibited. So far there isn’t friction with their exhibition. I am thrilled to be pulling work out that has been boxed in storage for years and to finally see it on the wall.

But I think you’re asking something else, about bodies, desire, touch and gazes in institutional spaces. What were you thinking about there?

GMS: Well, I was surprised and excited by two images you included in the ”Conditions” show at Team Gallery; the image of the two penises surrounding your face and then the image in which the sitter has their ass in your face. I was at first uncomfortable and made aware of myself looking at gay sex, or the suggestion of it, and feeling desire in a gallery space. This is the kind of friction I'm talking about. The bodies and desires are invading the space. Do you think about it in these terms or does it not feel radical to you? When these kinds of pictures exist in zines and publications like BUTT, they seem fitting and at “home”, as the publications are/were meant for a gay readership. But in the gallery space or the museum, the pictures invade the ethics of the space.

PMS:  [Those two pictures are] also about proximity, and especially how you relate to the friction of them appearing in the gallery space, outside of their more comfortable home of gay fandom. I’m really into those and glad they were included in the show because I think they also complicate the other pictures in the space that *aren’t* sexually explicit. I’m glad that they elicited discomfort and arousal. I was thinking about a viewer in public, implicated in looking. Choosing to look or continue walking the perimeter of the gallery. Being seen.

 When I first began photographing people I knew I decided to make visible the possibility (maybe my desire?) that every subject had been, was, or could be an intimate partner. But the work was hardly explicit. Intimacy and ease in the photographs created a space of projection, and it’s funny that people remember that work as having a lot of explicit nudity when in fact it was overwhelmingly bust portraits and a few non-erotic nudes with a few exceptions.

 So back to the Conditions — I wanted that work to sit alongside the partially clothed portraits of men, then portraits of women, that the sexual charge could rub up against other works. I’m not sure if it’s radical or just a bit vulnerable, because of course there’s my sister and her friend at the opening!

 It’s incredibly easy to make an erotic picture but it’s incredibly hard to make a thoughtful picture depicting sex unfolding. In those, I wanted to balance the rationality and attention to precision required by the camera with the erotic excess that is otherwise overflowing.

GMS:  Absolutely,  and maybe the reading of those early portraits as explicit, signals an impulse to read queer intimacy as explicit and erotic, but then some say the pictures aren't explicitly queer? (correct me if this is an assumption)  Though, those counter readings, or the projecting that happens, feel like productive aftermath of the work, which is a bit of what you're talking about now with the Conditions.

PMS: About the early portraits, yes that’s correct in a way. The framework is very queer, specifically homoerotic, at the center of it’s organization and coming-together. But the work doesn’t declare anyone’s gender or sexual identity. There are straight identifying men, for example. And only more recently are the portraits of women and trans subjects getting a bit of attention.

GMS: I imagine the images and the relationships to be a kind of calling in? There are people that or more or less directly implicated in the content of the work. I always come back to this idea and working through questions like: Who is this for? Who can read and relate to this work? Do you think proximity is necessary for a successful portrait? Or more so, what are the key components of a successful portrait if not proximity. Something Elle Pérez said, in their conversation with Jordan Weitzman on Magic Hour, struck me, especially in relationship to what we're talking about now. Their general thought was that making a portrait is all about love. What do you think about that in terms of your own work?

PMS: Very good question - so about proximity, it has nothing to do with whether a portrait is successful. The kind of proximity I’m talking about is the viewer’s proximity. Because that proximity is about an awareness of how they are, themselves, positioned in relationship to our intimacy. And yes, it’s all about love. You have to fall in love a little bit. But then I’ll get back to sentimentality...


GMS: Lets turn towards the Biennial and the show you advocated for/proposed to the curatorial team. What inspired this project? And how did it go over with the team at the Whitney?

PMS:  The Whitney project was inspired by the photographs we made together in Brooklyn in June 2017, and the photos that followed that July with James Garcia in Los Angeles. Your bringing your camera to photograph alongside me in the make-shift studio at Katie and A.K.s apartment was a big turning point! I wanted to introduce another point-perspective, or implication of one in the interaction to disrupt the repetition of centering my own camera/lens. I loved the moments where our pictures came together and when you turned to photograph the apartment kitchen itself and it’s every-day details.

But that was the turn that opened up the Dark Room project. It hadn’t yet turned into the Whitney proposal. So in the fall on 2017 I included the double-portrait of us in the first show I did with Team Gallery at the bungalow in Venice Beach. Then in my second show with DOCUMENT in the Spring of 2018 I included a double-portrait of me and James. In that picture, like the one with you, he is photographing but unlike the picture with you, his camera is at the center of my picture and I am entering from the side. In a positive review of the show in ARTFORUM critic’s picks James was described as a model assisting in setting up my camera. I was upset that the reviewer collapsed our two separate cameras into one while removing his agency as a fellow photographer.

So that’s where I got the idea to propose a show, if the opportunity came up, of the photographs taken by you, James, and other friends who had been photographing alongside me. I just asked you all if you’d let me share any pictures you liked with curators or folks I had studio visits with, right? I had been gathering them for a year or so before the opportunity for Whitney came up, and I had several conversations with them and sent emails to you all about some unnamed opportunity before everyone said yes, I got the confirmation, and we could move ahead. Originally I didn’t want to include any of my own “solo” authored photos in the proposal.

GMS: Why didn't you want to include any of your own solo authored photos?

PMS: I wanted to see how viewers would understand the work. I definitely hadn’t thought of a platform as major as the biennial when I first thought of the proposal for a show like this. Again, it came on the heels of me noticing that people described you and James as models posing at making pictures, or as assistants to my camera/pictures and so I wanted to forefront the pictures you made with your own cameras alongside me.


GMS: During the panel discussion that the Whitney held just recently, you mentioned a question that came across your radar. “What's the setup and what's the event? Is there a specific moment or just an unfolding set of conditions, or elements set into motion?”  I want to lob this question to you because I think it also addresses the moving set of relationships happening in the Biennial show.

PMS:Oh that is a tough question. I wish I had more time to spend with the Biennial. I don' t know what to make of the idea yet. I'm perhaps too embedded in it and it encompasses all of my work. I just wanted to draw focus to it and raise questions on the surface. I hope that it was successful in some way. I like your thoughts though, and am more interested in listening than talking at the moment.

All images © Paul Mpagi Sepuya