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.
