Known for his complex, multi-layered works that incorporate and reference historical as well as contemporary ideas around photographic representation, Paul Mpagi Sepuya's photographs hover ambiguously between recognizable and abstract imagery. Most of the photographs are ostensibly portraits, and Sepuya mobilizes the vast history of that tradition, yet, simultaneously challenges the viewer to identify exactly what or whom they are perceiving.

Sepuya says this project is a study by the artist "of black material in reproduction and subject position. Digital photographs produced as salt-paper prints present questions about the fidelity of black as an unfixed value. Sepuya (Black) holds, presses, and affixes an unexposed Fuji Instant Film Print (black) against cut and torn work prints depicting fragments of bodies embracing in varying shades of (Black). These differing blacks collapsed through language as singularly Black rendered in the soft, warm tones of the salt paper prints, one of the earliest photographic printing technologies, notably used by Henry Fox Talbot in his series Bust of Patroclus (1843). This is the beginning of a larger process of research by the Artists, while touching on an earlier work Untitled (2018), a unique collage produced for New Photography 2018 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, which references the history of photography through various white and black subjects from Talbot to Minor White, Robert Mapplethorpe to Rotimi Fani-Kayode."

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, San Bernardino, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and Guggenheim Museums, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Getty Museum and MOCA Los Angeles, among others. His work has been reviewed in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Art in America, and he was featured on the cover of ARTFORUM’s March 2019 issue. Sepuya has been in recent exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, New York, Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Barbican Centre, London, the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. A survey of work from 2008 - 2018 was presented at CAM St. Louis and University of Houston Blaffer Art Museum, accompanied by a monograph published by CAM St. Louis and Aperture Foundation. He is Acting Associate Professor in Media Arts at the University of California San Diego.