Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Compressed Tenses
October 2–December 21, 2026
Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s work challenges something fundamental in how we have come to think about photography. While studio portraiture is at the foundation of his work, he does not engage the studio as a space dedicated to illusion — perfectly lit portraits of carefully composed sitters. He has questioned these conventions through a vocabulary of fragmentation, layering, and mirror imagery that reveals the different elements involved, from the physical set-up of a photograph to the social dynamics at play. In effect, he has questioned the camera as an aestheticizing tool and embraced it as a means to complicate its subject. In doing this, his work becomes a deeply questioning exploration of the history of photography.
Sepuya’s work is grounded in the studio as a site through which people, objects, and experiences are both positioned and displaced. Beginning with work made in his Brooklyn apartment, photographs of friends, artists, collaborators, and himself depict presence and absence at once. With the artist’s move to Los Angeles, the studio became a consistent site of increasingly complex ideas. Sepuya’s experiments with mirrors are especially formative, finding that slight
optical shifts can radically alter the dynamics of a portrait or a scene. In these images, he allows glimpses of the studio setting and reveals the apparatuses of photography, including backdrops, lighting, lenses, and the camera itself. Although little is hidden, much is obscured, with narratives left to conjecture.
All of these compositions are constructed through analog techniques, with no digital manipulation. In contrast to the artifice of most traditional portraiture, Sepuya points to the human element of picture taking—embracing fingerprints, smudges, and dust on a mirror’s surface to make his images more tactile.
Sepuya’s collages emanate from this tactility. While they are not studies for his larger photography practice, they are linked to this work through ideas around place, sitter, and context. The collages also find their affiliation with the larger practice through touch, a vital component of his work. Touch is often captured in the images not only in the sitter’s physical connections but also in the palimpsest of marks on the mirrors used to make these images.
This haptic aspect also manifests in the making of the collages. Laser prints from the enormous surplus of residual images that come from the studio practice are touched. They are torn, taped, jostled, overlayed and moved into aching close proximity, physically juxtaposing one moment in time with another.
The exhibition Compressed Tenses (the title is taken from Brian O’Doherty’s collection of essays, Studio and Cube) explores this ancillary and ongoing practice of physical collage in Sepuya’s work. Often constructed while participating in residencies or traveling, his collages are in direct conversation with his other photographic studio work. Like the entirety of his practice, the collages encapsulate a multi-layered investigation of various histories: the gaze, otherness, relationships, queerness and, of course, photography itself.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, San Bernardino, CA) isa Los Angeles-based artist working in photography. He received an MFA in photography at UCLA in 2016 and a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2004. He went on to participate in Artist-in-Residence programs at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Studio Museum in Harlem and Fire Island Artist Residency. Sepuya’s work is in the permanent collections of the Getty, LACMA, SFMOMA, MoMA, the Whitney and the Guggenheim, the Studio Museum, Stedelijk Museum, Tate Modern and Victoria & Albert Museum, among others. Solo museum exhibitions include Fotomuseum Amsterdam, Deichtorhallen PHOXXI in Hamburg, and museum surveys at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Nottingham Contemporary in the UK and Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. Sepuya is a Professor in the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San Diego. He is represented by Bortolami Gallery, New York; DOCUMENT, Chicago; Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich and Paris; and Vielmetter Los Angeles.
Compressed Tenses is a Featured Exhibition for the 2026 FotoFocus Biennial: The Long View. Now in its eighth iteration, the Biennial activates over 70 exhibitions at museums, galleries, universities, and public spaces throughout Greater Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Northern Kentucky in October 2026—the largest of its kind in America. The Long View theme considers aspects of time and perspective in photography and film, and how these mediums shape our understanding of the world.
