Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Hi, this is Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and this is a project with work by Dicko Chan, James Garcia, Ariel Goldberg, Clay Kerrigan, Clifford Prince King, Giancarlo Montes Santangelo, Emerson Ricard, A.L. Steiner, Peter Tomka, Derrick Woods-Morrow, and myself. 

It's been a constant thing in all of the portraits that a certain level of intimacy was the starting point. And I liked the leveling of that. Like, photograph everyone as if they were a current or past or future lover. That's sort of been the starting point.

Narrator: The photographs on view here were taken in Sepuya’s studio, or in makeshift studio spaces he set up. He took some of the pictures, and appears in others, which were taken by friends who are also photographers. The projects and the idea of authorship become intertwined: in some of these pictures, the subject of the photograph was also actively making a photograph, which from our current perspective we can only imagine.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya: There isn't really a title to the project. I don't even know if collaboration is the right word for it. I think part of this is trying to figure out what that language is―all of us have a very different relationship to photography. Some of us are photographers who have gone to either undergraduate or graduate programs, some of us have exhibited, some of us have never, some are self-taught artists who are in the process of pursuing a more formalized photo education, some not.