Artist, Paul Mpagi Sepuya: A Mirror Study is a picture where a collage of fragments and my body holding them up in some way was composed on the surface of the mirror.
My name is Paul. I am an artist based in Los Angeles.
This work is made from a digital camera without digital manipulation. A camera is placed on a tripod, pointed at a mirror. A collage of fragments are taped to the surface of the mirror in a triangular composition, obscuring the tripod.
They are from a set of images that I had made with my friend Robbie. There's a fragment of his lower torso and his legs. There's also a fragment of a picture of his arm that extends out of the frame, so it appears as if his arm is holding his foot. And then the bottom of this triangular fragment is being held down, but slightly peeled away, by my arm. And so you can see that my arm is in front of the mirror, because you can see its reflection to the left.
Fragmentation and cropping are just a part of every photographic image. If what we typically think of as the portrait component is not visible, right, the recognizable face, that does not mean that that subject has been erased.