ALL SEEING EYE

American photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya holds a mirror up to the relationship between subject and camera

- AINDREA EMELIFE

Paul Mpagi Sepuya has one of the most distinctive aesthetics in 21st-century photography. In an age of ripe discussions about representation and identity, Sepuya, who is known for placing himself and his camera in the centre of his portraits, exposes the mechanics of image-making and identity construction with each shutter release. His use of mirrors to explore the unbound possibilities of portraiture reveals the complicated system of self-perception. Thrusting identity into our eyes, he questions and explores the multifaceted nature of humanity, and negotiates the complicated notions of the gaze. How do we see and how are we seen? Sepuya, a Black queer man, explores the intersection of contemporary social discourse in his work. Questioning how categorisation frames our way of seeing, he is turning the mirror on the viewer to question their complicity in this gaze.

In some instances, the body is obscured, in others, entirely exposed – this concealing and revealing creates a dynamic confusion that awards agency to the subject and emphasises the idea of identity as fragmented. ‘Something may be concealed, or hidden from view, but nothing is ever actually concealed.’ Sepuya discusses his new work: ‘There’s a lot of playing around with the formal and compositional elements of the images and the studio. In some of the recent images, you see someone looking into a mirror from a position where the viewer is unable to see the reflection of the person. You can see the image of the person, but the viewer is excluded from the enclosed loop of self-gratification that the subject is engaged in.’ We are invited to discover the relationship between the photographer and the subject, and the stories in the space between the camera and two bodies.