Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Dark Room A–Z

Paul Mpagi Sepuya reflects on the methodologies, strategies, and points of interest behind a single, expansive body of work at a pivotal moment in his career. 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 three distinct “voices,” allowing for a comprehensive cross-referencing of conceptual categories. Each category is alphabetized and illuminated via new texts by curator and scholar Gökcan Demirkazik; selections from previously published texts about the work by critics, colleagues, and friends; quotations of other writers’ work that inspire the artist; as well as writings by the artist on his thematic preoccupations as they appear and reappear throughout this ongoing body of work. Dark Room A–Z serves as an iterative return and exhaustive manual to the strategies and generative ways of working that have informed Sepuya’s image-making, after nearly two decades of practice.”

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 456
Number of images: 350
Publication date: 2024-11-26
Measurements: 9.6 x 11.6 inches
ISBN: 9781597115353

“Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Dark Room A–Z excavates and maps out artistic data points—how his subjects relate to each other, their personal testimonies, excerpts from scholarly interviews—that fully unpack his complex approach. Crucially, he brings visibility to the Black and queer bodies often absent from photography studios of yore.”—Surface

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (born in San Bernardino, California, 1982) is a Los Angeles–based artist. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among other institutions. Notable recent exhibitions include a solo survey at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, a solo exhibition at Amsterdam’s Foam museum, the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and Being: New Photography 2018 at the Museum of Modern Art.
Gökcan Demirkazik is an art historian, curator, and critic, and is currently a PhD student in art history at University of California, Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in Art Asia Pacific, Artforum, ArtReview, Di’van: A Journal of Accounts, Even, and Frieze. An alumnus of the Ashkal Alwan Home Workspace Program, Beirut, Demirkazik holds a BA in art history from Harvard College.