By Greg Tiani, April 10, 2026
Mirrors-bodies-cameras. As you enter, you are in his studio-darkroom-archive. In the crisp white light of Fotomuseum Winterthur’s recently revamped building, it is pointless to wonder where the pictures begin and where the museum ends. Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s exhibition “Focus. Desire.” purports to bring to Switzerland the American artist’s first major show but achieves much more: the creation of a queer and Black space—of Sepuya’s spaces—over four rooms, where the lines between object and subject are as undefined as the smudges on surfaces which inhabit Sepuya’s work.
The exhibition opens to Sepuya’s “Studio (0X5A5038)” (2020), printed in larger-than-human size and mounted on a large wooden structure on wheels in the middle of the front room. The photograph introduces visitors to Sepuya’s space of production—his studio, which multiplies as fragments across different series. It is a place of jaggedness, of glimpsed bodies, makeshift building materials, photographic instruments, and a practice hinging on reflection, repetition, and refraction. Fingerprinted mirrors live alongside photographic prints peeling from the wall. A thin vertical line and a length of tape reveal the artifice of the image: the two-paned mirror at which the central camera is pointed. Behind the camera and a second angled mirror on wheels which displaces the gaze outside the frame: a hand. Though the expectation is that it belongs to Sepuya, it is impossible to know with certainty whose it is. But this is beyond the point: we imagine the artist behind the camera as much as we imagine ourselves in front of it, participating in the erotic construction and deconstruction of the scene. The hand becomes nothing more than another object which exists in a shared space.
In Sepuya’s work, Black hands and black backdrops simply coexist as objects and materials without hierarchy. Portraits, studio lights, figure studies, tripods are displayed in the space with equal importance. This is perhaps one of the greatest successes of “Focus. Desire.”: its capacity to be representative of Sepuya’s work, and reveal the museum as another collection of objects in space. Sepuya’s work extends beyond the frame, sticking to the scenography of transport wooden crates, Black and queer theory books, grassroot zines, and to visitors alike. Everything is photographic object, should you focus; and everything engenders a particular queer pleasure, should you desire. In this framework, “Focus” and “Desire” become less nominal concepts of queer photography than they are eroticised actions to perform in the exhibition.
“Focus. Desire.” favours promiscuous interactions with the photographs, in all their theoretical, erotic, oppressive, sometimes racist messiness. This becomes particularly poignant in the darkroom spaces to each side of the front room in the exhibition, where economies of queer pleasure and the historical racial objectification of Black bodies coagulate on the print like bodily oils on a mirror. “Dark Room Studio Mirror (0X5A5515)” (2021) conflates the haunted imprints of this history with the vibrations of queer desire: naked bodies and smears leave the same imprints on the material, between the ghostly and the pleasurable. In this charged space, the whiteness of the studio gives way to moodier purples, browns, and blacks. The bright light turns into the red of darkroom safelights and backrooms, gay sex spaces; tears in the fabric of backdrops become improvised glory holes: the places of the production of photography and of queer sex overlap in forms, practices, and gooey consistencies.
There is a sexual intimacy in image production which resonates deeply with the precarious coming into being of a queer subjectivity. Sepuya is acutely aware of this synergy in his more recent works, but it is in his earlier portraits and in his self-published magazine SHOOT (2005-2008) that the artist’s incorporation of queer and Black photographic lineages into his practice is laid bare.
Sepuya’s early works are displayed in the final room of the exhibition alongside an archive of notes, published volumes, ephemera, and academic texts. With their co-presence in the exhibition, these objects stress that what has been tenuously named a “post-AIDS” generation of queer photographers in the USA—a generation marked by the loss of mentors to AIDS—remains visually and conceptually informed by previous cohorts of queer artists. Jack Pierson, Lyle Ashton Harris, Mark Morrisroe all find their successor in Sepuya, whether in direct quotation or indirect nods. Indeed, one of the shipping crates in the scenography of the “Archive” section is labelled as containing works by Morrisroe, whose estate is housed at Fotomuseum—a playful wink to this genealogy.
For an exhibition which stresses the permanent renegotiation of Black and queer subjectivities, pleasures, and desires, the “Archive” is perhaps where the ongoing-ness of Sepuya’s work might feel at its most disjointedly, prematurely concluded. However, the curatorial juxtaposition of Sepuya’s Mirror Study collages carefully mediates the possibility of a calcified historicization for an inquiry into how histories, manuscripts, and objects actively play a role in the shaping of an ongoing practice: earlier portraits are renegotiated as printed objects which are rephotographed in the mirror space; theoretical texts and photographic mentors weave their way as companions to Sepuya’s images, highlighting the richness of his sensibility and cogent historical references.
Though it offers a comprehensive overview of Sepuya’s different series across time, “Focus. Desire.” escapes being defined as a retrospective exhibition. The implications of a retrospective are too linear, too straight-presenting when brushed up against queerness. Instead, visitors are invited to participate in a scopophilic cruising through Sepuya’s times and spaces. This is not an exhibition full of epiphanies or hidden gems, and this might just be its strength: it welcomes the familiarity of a photographic practice which sets up and offers the conditions—however stable or unstable these might be—for visitors to work and rework themselves without threat. The internal battles of desire and subjectivity should be fought in serene trenches.
Greg Tiani (PhD) is a curator and art historian specialising in contemporary photography and queer cultures. He is currently the Head of Exhibitions at Verzasca Foto and has collaborated with Centre de la photographie Genève, Fotofestival Lenzburg, and Visual AIDS, among others.
PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA "Darren, September 8," 2011 © Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Courtesy the artist and DOCUMENT, Chicago and Lisbon.
PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA "Some Recent Pictures : A Journal, Volume 3, 2020" © Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Courtesy the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.
PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA "Studio (0X5A5038)", 2020. Courtesy the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.
PAUL MPGAI SEPUYA "Darkroom Mirror (_2070386)", 2017. © Paul Mpagi Sepuya