Paul Mpagi Sepuya is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography alongside related zines and ephemera. Over the past decade, he has become well known for studio-based projects that complicate questions of authorship, the visualisation of race and sexuality, and the structures of the photographic medium. His carefully constructed studio scenes, often involving mirrors alongside various props, backdrops and photographic apparatus, confront the legacies of European studio portraiture and the politics of performance, whilst proposing new strategies for Black and queer figuration.
Between 2005–2008, Sepuya published a zine called SHOOT, with each issue comprised of a single portrait sitting with a selection of friends and collaborators. These early experiments in publishing were both an attempt at moving beyond a practice that prioritized the single, monumental image, and also a methodology for research and the processing of darkroom outtakes, test prints and ephemera.
Long out of print and extremely hard to find, all seven issues of SHOOT are now compiled in a new title from Primary Information, including the original editioned inserts. This volume allows for a new experience of Sepuya’s early experiments in publishing, and the processes of development, contradiction and reiteration that a zine practice affords. Lillian Wilkie sat down with Sepuya to learn more.
Lillian Wilkie: Talk to me about your early experiments with zine-making and the influence of [the seminal New York artist bookstore and project space] Printed Matter.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya: We had a freshman class at NYU on Fridays where we would be taken around different neighbourhoods, like Soho or Chelsea, and I'm pretty sure that was my introduction to Printed Matter. A few years later, around 2004-2005, I was working on a zine of outtakes and little prints I was making in the darkroom, just figuring stuff out really. Around that time, I met Christopher Schulz, who was also brainstorming ideas for the zine that would become his serial publication Pinups. He was interning at Printed Matter, and he would give me tips and guidance on the practical aspects of making my zine. Around the same time, I met AA Bronson. I think it was through Friendster, actually! Social media was very strange then. I remember thinking, “Are these actual people?!” After I took copies of my zine into Printed Matter, AA suggested a few other places who might want to stock it, including Art Metropole in Toronto. I ended up connecting with a whole community of folks in Toronto, like Ann Dean, Andrew Zealy, and the amazing Will Munro. AA was also my introduction to Skylight in LA which is a place I'd probably visited as a teenager, but never really thought about since. Through that I was connected to Darin Klein, who was working there at the time. Once a few other stores were carrying the zines, people started asking about prints. Eventually both Printed Matter and Art Metropole had little boxes of my prints in vitrines, and these were really the first places that the work was shown.
Lillian Wilkie: Where did the impulse to work with zines come from? Did you start making zines and then find a community through that practice, or were you working within a community in which the zine form was a mode of communication, and so you joined in?
Paul Mpagi Sepuya: In terms of that impulse, I would say that at the time, I was putting so much stuff online, on my website and a WordPress blog. Suddenly everyone was sharing and exchanging things through hyperlinks. I was shooting a lot, getting my film processed, going to the rental darkrooms in Brooklyn, making all these prints, and then I would scan them and upload a couple of the strongest portraits. But I had all this physical work that wasn’t going anywhere, all these prints that were stuck in boxes under the bed or in the basement. The first SHOOT zine I made with contact sheets and outtakes came from me wanting to do something that I could use all these pictures for, instead of selecting one key portrait to post online. I called the zines SHOOT because each one was just images from one sitting. I experimented with little bits of text on the first ones, and it’s so funny and kind of embarrassing to read them now.
Lillian Wilkie: They’re so un-self-conscious!
Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Yes. Totally not self-conscious, not savvy, They’re very honest. It's like, “Hi, I'm Paul, these are some pictures that I made. This is my friend.” And then I’d write a little bit about the person. So, it was about making something that I could just put out there. And dialogue is built into the medium; the reason why someone makes something that's reproducible and able to be shared is because there's a desire for there to be some communication or correspondence. And then people really liked the zines and fed that back to me, and I responded. Simultaneously, I had started switching from photographing strangers or people that I hardly knew, into only making portraits with people that I knew, was getting to know or reconnecting with. On reflection, it all kind of went hand in hand. As I was making the portraits that would then become defined as a project a few years later, the zines kind of helped me make sense of the direction the work was moving in and the kinds of spaces it would occupy.
Lillian Wilkie: So how did this facsimile edition with Primary Information come about?
Paul Mpagi Sepuya: I ran into James [Hoff, Executive Editor and Artistic Director of Primary Information] at a Renée Green opening at Dia Beacon in Spring last year, and we chatted a bit. I had just opened my show TRANCE at Bortolami in New York City. Later, James followed up and asked if I'd ever thought about publishing a facsimile of the SHOOT zines. And I was like, “Actually, yes!” People had asked about them over the years, and back in 2010 I had scanned them all and made a Blurb book, just so I had something to show people, because none of the originals were available anymore.
Lillian Wilkie: Did you have an archive of the original ones, or did they just go out into the world?
Paul Mpagi Sepuya: I have a couple of each of them archived, and then I do have all of the original materials. I made the Blurb book during a residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. It was the first time I was having studio visits and learning how to do studio visits, and I wanted a straightforward way to just show the work. I also included a Blurb link on my website, and anyone could order it print on demand for $40 or something. But eventually I had to take it down. These zines were originally priced between $8-15. I started to realise that people were selling full sets of them on the secondary market for thousands of dollars. And soon, those Blurb books that I had made, some of which I’d just given away, were reselling for $600 on eBay. And I was like, this is absurd. So, by the time James reached out, I had been thinking about republishing the work, because these issues had been on my mind, and also because the spring of 2025 marked 20 years since I did the first one.
Lillian Wilkie: In SHOOT issue 5 you turn the camera on yourself, and we start to see glimpses of the kind of constructed portraiture and self-portraiture that you’d later become known for, with the shutter release cable visible, for example. Then, in issue 7, we see an image of you shooting with your Mamiya that looks like an early example of what would later be known as your Mirror Studies.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Oh, interesting! Actually, I’m not shooting into a mirror. I started experimenting with using mirrors just after that, with Nico, the subject of the first issue of SHOOT. I shot a whole series with him where it seems like he’s looking directly into the camera, but actually he’s looking in a mirror. It’s only just occurred to me how relevant that became to my later work! But the image that you’re referring to was made whilst I was working on a series called Subject Object Proof, around 2007. I had set up a mini DV camera and was just documenting my shoots, documenting my friends’ conversations, and various things happening in the studio. I became really interested in this sense of looking back and forth; the back and forth of the gaze between the subject and the camera, the subject and myself, myself and the camera, et cetera. Around the same time, I also became really curious with the idea of artists who go on TV, which is why I shot Christian for the iteration of Subject Object Proof that resulted in this zine. He had been on this reality TV show called Artstar which revolved around an exhibition with Jeffrey Deitch. I wanted someone who had this kind of art persona. Because I was keen to explore this sense of the back and forth, I also set up another mini DV camera, and filmed my eyes whilst I was shooting Christian. It ended up being a two-channel video that bounces back and forth between him sitting and moving and talking, and my eyes, my hands operating the camera. And so, issue 7 of SHOOT is the zine of images and stills from that shoot with Christian.
Lillian Wilkie: Were you thinking at all about the Warhol Screen Tests?
Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Yeah, definitely. I was obsessed with Warhol in high school. I bought everything I could find on VHS. I had all the Paul Morrissey films, and I was obsessed with finding out as much as I could. Later, I saw the Screen Tests when they were exhibited at MoMA, which was 2003. So they were definitely on my mind.
Lillian Wilkie: It feels like there’s a shift in energy with SHOOT issue 3. It feels very sophisticated, in an understated way. You have this incredible text by the artist Ido Fluk, which describes a liaison with an older man. Alongside this there are portraits of two men, one older and one younger. It’s very ambiguous how the subjects of the photographs relate to the text, if at all.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Ido is primarily a filmmaker, but he had this idea for a short story. We were just brainstorming one day and decided that we would post the story in Missed Connections on Craigslist. Then we printed it out and left it in bars, and included an email address asking people to get in touch to tell us why they were drawn to the story, which was simply called Frank. I then set up some portrait sittings with six or seven different people, who had got in touch saying they identified with one or more of the characters in that text. So those two guys in issue 3 had never met each other, they’re just two individuals who had independently responded to the text. Neither are Frank. We were playing with that ambiguity. It's definitely been interesting to reflect on the things that develop later in my practice—the mirrors, the back and forth, the playfulness, the friendship—all these aspects were already present.
Lillian Wilkie: There’s this gorgeous blend of playful friendship and subtle eroticism in issue 6, which sees two subjects interacting. I feel like this issue really pre-empts your later work in the Daylight Studio and Mirror Studies series.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya: That shoot came out of a project where myself and a few other artists had been invited to create work that responded to the John Cameron Mitchell film Shortbus (2007). I originally organised a portrait sitting with my friends Colin and Rodrigo, who were extras in the film. Then I asked them to invite other people that they knew to sit with them. And then those people would come back and invite someone else to sit with them. So it was like this branching tree, over a period of weeks or months. I have so many portraits from those sittings, but there was just something about the playfulness and ease of this sitting that made me want to bring it together in a zine.
Lillian Wilkie: Thank you so much Paul, it’s been wonderful to learn more about this work!
SHOOT, by Paul Mpagi Sepuya is available now, for direct purchase and trade orders.