Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s work is “suspended between self-portraiture, the camera and homoerotic visual culture”, in the words of Charlotte Jansen, who interviewed the American photographer for Elephant Issue 38. Sepuya’s portraits—intimate, intertwined snapshots of himself, his friends, lovers and acquaintances, situated within a constructed studio space—offer up a potent reinvention of the male nude and its place within art history. “My work is about the openness of queer and homoerotic social structures, where there are slippery and less rigid boundaries between platonic, creative and sexual relations,” he told Jansen. “That convergence…has a lot to offer when exploring photography as a medium of construction and desire, of looking and knowing we are being looked at.”
