CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/8/2020

Paul Mpagi Sepuya in 'Young, Gifted and Black'

Paul Mpagi Sepuya's "Darkroom Mirror Study (0X5A1531)" (2017) is reproduced from Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists, our best-selling new release this month. The artist writes: "The suggestive and overlapping meanings in the term darkroom—both the historical origin of the photographer’s craft as well as the privileged yet marginalized site of queer and colored sexuality and socialization—lie at the center of this body of work… Within my photographs, I inhabit the obscuring fabric, or as my stand-in, a reflected glimpse of the camera or tripod. My hands touch, manipulate, and adjust. I move from in front of the camera, to behind it, to reflected in the mirror. In 'Darkroom Mirror Study (0X5A1531)', the cloth, my body, and the black figure of the camera tripod throw into relief the latent bodily accumulations on the mirror’s surface. I inhabit an ambiguous place within these images. My role as photographer is one of negotiation—oscillating between the precision of the photographic apparatus and the loss of rationality within erotic excess."⁠