Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics, now on view at LACMA through July 27, 2025, finds aesthetic connections among 60 artists working in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The exhibition and its catalogue are among the first to examine nearly a quarter century of production by Black artists.
Curator Dhyandra Lawson asked four artists to respond to written questions about their work and the diasporic experiences they are connected to. The artists’ respective practices center on photography, the most pervasive mode of representation today. In this excerpt, Paul Mpagi Sepuya reflects on his work Daylight Studio (0X5A0161) (2022), which is featured in the exhibition. The full interview can be found in the Imagining Black Diasporas exhibition catalogue.
Dhyandra Lawson: Twentieth-century Martinican poet Édouard Glissant observed in his poem “The Open Boat” that the transatlantic slave trade became “something shared” among Black people, “the descendants, one people among others.” Glissant contended that the incredible diversity of Black people animates connections among them. “In relation,” he argued, “the whole is not the finality of its parts.”
In Daylight Studio (0X5A0161), you portray yourself sitting atop a wooden pedestal with your body turned away from the viewer, toward a black backdrop in your studio. Can you please describe the position of your body and its relationship to the viewer? What is the role and significance of distance for you in this picture?
Paul Mpagi Sepuya: That is a complicated question because the position is one both of dependence on and disregard for the viewer, who is outside of the scene, outside of the studio, in another place and context. In this photograph, I am the maker, the operator of the camera, the subject of the photograph among objects, transformed by proximity, context, and position into another object. It is a wholly unnatural position that requires an eventual viewer to complete. It’s important to note that this is one of my photographs that does not feature a reflection in the mirror. For the “Daylight Studio” series (2022–ongoing), I make the photographs in my studio filled with contemporary and antique references to 19th- and early-20th-century Western European and American photography studios. These were operated by white photographers at a moment where depictions and fantasies of racialized, gendered, and sexualized images of labor, leisure, and pleasure were being formed.
DL: How do you reconcile or explore the tension between relation and distance in Daylight Studio (0X5A0161) and/or your practice?
PMS: In one way or another, all visually descriptive lens-based photography puts the viewer in relation, through distance, to another. And it aligns the viewer’s vantage with the apparatus, which may or may not be the same as that of the photographer. So with my mirror works, I’m particularly interested in the implication of the camera that seems to point at the viewer outside the work but which is actually in a closed loop, photographing its own reflection. The viewer is in relation but distanced by their complete exclusion from the photograph. In Daylight Studio (0X5A0161), relation and distance are more structured by race, objectification, and the viewer’s subjective proximity to being the Black body, or their desire to possess the Black body.
DL: European leaders planned their conquest of Africa in 1884 at the Berlin Conference—45 years after photography’s invention in 1839. In 1870, Europe controlled 10 percent of African territory. Forty years later, it controlled 90 percent. Nineteenth-century American and European daguerreotypes depicted Africans as specimens that were owned, spoken for, and rendered silent.
Two decades after photography was invented, the United States abolished slavery. American abolitionist Frederick Douglass was an early proponent of photography; he was also the most photographed man of the 19th century. He believed photographs possessed a special ability to transform how people saw each other and how people saw themselves. Douglass’s contention stands in contrast to an observation by contemporary British scholar Kobena Mercer. “Having more and more Black images does not necessarily mean that Black lives are more valued,” Mercer wrote in 2016. “The spectacularization of Blackness actually may conceal the fact that inequalities of race are growing worse.”
Considering the number of photographic images that circulate today, are you hesitant or optimistic about photography’s ability to adjust how Black and queer people are seen and, by extension, treated? Is taking control of Black or queer people’s image an intentional aspect of your practice? I’m also thinking about the way you work with friends, and the potential for the practice of photography to heal, bond, or facilitate the development of relationships.
PMS: I do not believe that more and more images circulating of Black or queer or other historically or currently marginalized people will change structural foundations of anti-Black racism, misogyny, transphobia, etc., or right colonial wrongs. Mercer is correct. I’m also very aware of the white transracial desire projected onto my body in the works I make, and of the fact that the majority of works by myself and other Black artists are desired and collected by white people.
What I am interested in is entangling the history and future of the medium with a requisite acknowledgment of Black subjects, Blackness as material quality in photographs, homoerotic desire, and queer forms of friendship and intimacy. I am also interested in a kind of ambivalence about racial exclusivity, in the idea that the subjects of Black artists’ work be exclusively and necessarily Black. I want anything and everything to become subject to Black inquiry, touch, desire, use, and misuse.