I took these photos last year when my wife, Sinéad and I, went to Sicily for our honeymoon. This vacation came after a year of non-stop work. The images reflect our attempt to release all tension and surrender ourselves to these beautiful and calming surroundings.
Credits
Photography and words Ottilie Landmark
www.instagram.com/ottilielandmark
My mom and I left Almaty, Kazakhstan for Canada in 1994. I was 9 years old. When you’re a refugee, you can’t go back to the country you came from for at least 3 years. We went back after 5 years.
My mom was sent to prison for obscure reasons almost immediately after our arrival in Almaty. We left as soon as she was released. I always hated Kazakhstan. I never missed the mountains that my mom always talked about. I never felt any connection to the place where I was from.
Growing confused about my identity, seventeen years later I decided to go back. I hiked the mountains where I grew up, slept in yurts, ate the food and spoke the language.
Being back home felt wonderful!
Credits
Photography and Words · Valeria Amirova
Credits
Photography · Cody Cobb
It’s the small details that capture attention in the work of Paul Mpagi Sepuya – the evidence and lasting presence of human encounter, finger prints and smudges on glass, for instance. Though the photographer works only with a digital camera, there’s a certain tactility that lingers in his work.
Relationships come to the forefront; Sepuya’s work centres around friendships, intimate encounters, muses and himself. The notion of the ‘dark room’ (which has been referenced both in titled works and in solo installations) lays claim to ambiguity – it both refers to the place in which the photographer creates, documents and develops, and it is also the space of homoerotic sexual exchange. The lines are, at once, blurred and clearly demarcated. In the absence of interpreting the dark room in terms of its analogue definition and purpose, Sepuya ‘develops’ his photography through a process of collaging, layering and re-production. A photograph becomes a multi-layered image, further distorted by the presence of mirrors that are often the focus of the camera. It’s difficult, at times, to ascertain what is what: within a single work, fragments of figures and moments in time are often combined. None of which is accidental; such an amalgamation of displaced aspects come together as a multifaceted study in portraiture.
Throughout Sepuya’s work there’s a critical awareness of the role that his camera plays in capturing time and its implications on human interaction – something that is quantified by the inclusion of his work at MoMA’s distinguished ‘New Photography’ exhibition under this year’s theme ‘being’.
NR: Some of your photographs address individuals by name in the title, others refer to a figure or figures; is there a logic behind the distinction?
Paul MPagi Sepuya: My earlier portrait projects, beginning with Beloved Object & Amorous Subject (Revisited) from2005 – 2008, and the other portraits up until 2014 were all titled by the name of the individual or subjects. I don’t photograph models and there are friendships, collaborations and at minimum social acquaintances with everyone at the beginning of or working together, it was important for me to ground the work in that social space. As the individual portraits moved into the world, and into various studios I was working in (the earlier works were photographed in my home), the titles came to include the date and location of the photograph. Those photographs could be portraits, or me re-photographing materials in my studio which gave way to a “collage” type style, though the work was never collaged.
Figures came into the work when I returned to Los Angeles for grad school at UCLA. Reconstituting materials through arranging them on the surface of mirrors that I would photograph in front of my tripod-camera allowed me to create compositions *about* subjects more loosely, and so the number of figures noted corresponded to the number of subjects in the fragments that made up the complete picture. Currently, I have left behind names from my titles. Each work is titled by the project that it inhabits (Mirror Study, A Portrait, Studio, A Ground, etc…), and the name given the file capture in camera.
«I’m interested in emphasizing the inside-outside aspect of recognition within this ‘dark room’ space where, like all of my work has been positioned, it is the meeting points of queer and homoerotic creative, social, and sexual exchange.»
NR: How do you relate to the people in your photos, when their bodies appear fragmented and abstracted?
PMS: I know every fragment, sliver of space or edge of a table that relates to a figure not present. That’s to say, they are never fragments or abstractions because, indexed alongside them in a larger project, are the notations that tie them to the full portraits. I make a point of saying that;
«no subjects are left to fragmentation and abstraction in my work; there is always a full portrait of each subject.»
NR: What is the appeal of digital photography for you?
PMS: It’s efficiency for my process, that’s it. I am strongly against the digital manipulation of my pictures, or creating/assembling pictures through digital collage, etc. The material that is arranged, cut, and affixed on the surface of the mirrors comes from the in-process materials in my studio. So to be able to photograph, print and re-photograph within a single space is important to me. It’s a method that began during my residency at the Center for Photography at Woodstock in 2010, and I have used in various forms since then.
NR: If taking a photograph can capture a specific moment in time, how does your practise (from taking a photograph to reworking and collaging it) relate to notions of time and memory?
PMS: I am less interested in moments in time (which I associate with the outside world) than with the “collage of compressed time” – or something to the effect that Brian O’Doherty speaks of in Studio and Cube: On The Relationship Between Where Art is Made and Where Art is Displayed. He describes studio time as placing all material in the present, within the reach of revision and remaking by the artist’s hand. That is how I associate the process of portrait-making with the real-world relationships that make that production possible.
NR: Can the context of viewing your work as part of a wider exhibition influence the way the pieces are perceived? And add to their development as ‘works in progress’?
PMS: Yes, indeed. All of my work is made toward the consideration of a grammar and visual rhythm, whether it’s content, formal elements or scale, in relation to my larger body of work.
NR: What is the allure of the physicality of photography (when it’s printed out to be used for collages, or when it’s featured in zines or books)?
PMS: Images can’t just free float. I am invested in the handling pictures, having to contend with them physically. I started by making zines and books, and with the current “collage” works,
«it is important that I am inherently a part of the image during the process of their making.»
While I work, I am within the reflected space of my studio.
NR: What, if anything, do you want the viewer to take away from your work in regards to queer and black identities?
PMS: Absolutely nothing as far as identity may be proscribed. But everything as far as the materiality and sociality of queerness, homoeroticism, and blackness as requisites for a kind of knowledge and experience otherwise obliterated by whiteness and heteronormativity.
NR: Your photographs often allude to the presence of people no longer present in the frame, from fingerprints in the mirror to abandoned orange peel; what is the significance of the documenting these aspects?
PMS: Whether a subject is represented through pictorial representation in a straight-up portrait or not,
«I want the images to include an indexical mark of the social world from which it comes.»
These traces of real people can’t be faked. They are like smoke to fire. Funnily (or frustratingly?) enough, someone once asked me about the “smoke” in the photographs and I had to correct and say, no they are *another* kind of trace. They are the smudges of bodies – my own and others – as we work to make the images.
NR: The photographer’s studio connotes a sense of purpose and control over the subject and the outcome, is this something that you consider or navigate through your work?
PMS: Since I first started working in a studio and became fascinated by the possibilities therein, it’s become a site for me that really amplifies my presence, in thinking about the history of that control asserted by the artist along with the loosening of social and sexual morality that becomes permissible in that space. The permission that, within the world of the artist, is given to re-arranging and representing desire.
Photos
When did you start creating collages and taking pictures?
I’ve been creating images of one sort or another for almost as long as I can remember, but I made my first series of collage-photographs — a series called “Skulls/Boys” — in 2006. I say “collage-photographs” because they start as collages, but the end result is a photograph of the collage taken during the process of making it. In some ways, the images in this first series were a progression of the work I had been creating for the zines I was making in the years leading up to this. I started making zines in 2001 and in them you can pretty much see all of the elements that I’m still obsessed by and working with today. So these zines were really formative for me and they lay the foundations for what would follow aesthetically, emotionally and thematically.
How do you find the balance between the vision you have and the mediums you are using.
I work in quite a few different mediums, but it’s always essentially the same process and the idea and emotion I have will generally dictate what form it should take. I just try to find the best way to articulate what I’m trying to express. Sometimes the idea is clearly a still image, other ideas have movement, sometimes I hear sounds, sometimes there’s no images at all and just words.
What inspired your style of work?
I’m really into things that have a strong mood and I like building little worlds that give me an emotional charge. I’m also really into contrast and how not only the meaning, but also the complete feeling of an image can change depending on what it’s placed next to. I use this kind of contrast a lot in my work, in both my collage-photographs and my films and videos.
Where do you get inspiration from? Are there any particular artists, photographers, painters you look up to their works?
My work is really personal and a lot of it is very rooted in the sensations and feelings of my own childhood. It’s like there’s this place inside me, a place that exists beyond language, and a lot of my work is an attempt to articulate what’s inside this place. I always refer to my work, particularly the collage-photographs, as “interior landscapes” because thats what they feel like to me. I’m also really interested in childhood in general. I think it’s such an extraordinary time in our lives. When I think back to my earliest memories, maybe four years old, everything seems so dark, so mysterious and so completely moody. Everything’s over-sized, out of proportion, and my perceptions of what I see and feel are so rich. I can’t make sense of it, but something about this just keeps pulling me back in.
How long does it take to create a piece? What is the process behind it?
Generally, with my collage-photographs, I tend to work in very concentrated, short bursts. I always have at least several projects that are in progress at any one time — usually film projects, because they tend to take a long time — but with the collages, it’s not unusual for me to not make anything at all for very long stretches of time and then have a burst of activity where I make a whole lot of work in a very short, intense period. I have to be in a very specific mood to make this work, so I wait and wait until there’s a sense of urgency about it, then it’s kind of like an eruption. The work needs to be pure, it needs to come from the right place, so I never try force it. In the meantime, I make films.
Would you say that there is a main thread connecting all your artworks and if so, what is it?
Yeah, there’s a very strong thread. All of my work is about childhood, and I really like to see images of children next to images of tornadoes and tornado-destroyed landscapes. There’s a bit of an obsessive element to it too, because I essentially keep doing the same thing over and over, trying to get closer and closer to something.
What kind of talks would you like to hear around your artworks? What kind of conversations would you like your artworks to spark?
I’m not sure. I never think about things like that. But, I guess if I had to choose an ideal response, it would probably be that people don’t think anything, but that my work could hit them in an emotional way.
