Mirror Image

A lot of the time, viewers don’t notice that this photograph was made using a mirror. You see a man taking a photograph, and another turned in the opposite direction. They’re leaning against each other, embracing. The person facing away from the camera is looking at the reflection in the mirror through his camera-phone screen. If you look closely, you can see a little bit of his face reflected. Otherwise, no faces are visible.

In this instance, the person taking the picture with a Canon 5 DSR camera is me. I have made a whole series of these portraits with friends over the past few years, with different variations and set-ups. Sometimes it’s me taking the picture, sometimes not. Photographers have been making pictures using mirrors for centuries and, even if it’s not the focus of their work, you’ll often find an image with mirrors in their archives. I was really interested in my own relationship to these kinds of pictures.

Around the time I took Figure (0X5A0918) 2019, I had been looking over pictures that had been similar selfie outtakes, in preparation for an exhibition to be held at Vielmetter Los Angeles in 2020. There was one image from 2017 in which I photographed a friend taking a selfie of his reflection in the mirror. What made me come back to that picture was that, on the surface of his phone, you could see his face. Also, the wide angle of the phone’s camera revealed the whole set-up of the shoot, whereas in my own picture, all that was visible was the black fabric of the backdrop. It was also his selfie that revealed me, in my black jeans and brown sweater. Because I was photographing in front of mirrors at the time, the studio had been a closed loop or sealed-off space. But the selfie was a way out.

Photography as a medium tends toward rapid dissemination. People have this idea that a photograph goes out into the world immediately after it is taken. But I’m very slow. It’s usually several years before I show my work. I like the idea that these selfies have already been posted, have moved through the world on friends’ Instagram stories. At a certain point, I stopped asking friends to put their phones away. When I was working on this series, which I finished in 2021, I was conscious of not wanting to make pictures in which anything was being faked or staged. Every time you see a camera pointed at the mirror, that’s the camera making the image. That is where the titling of the works comes from, too. For instance, in my work Figure (0X5A0918), the sequence of numbers and letters is the file name that the camera imprinted. That also indicates that this was a single exposure, not a composite image. If I’m making an image of a space that feels tricky or complicated or confounding, the viewer needs to trust that what they are seeing was actually there. That’s also the reason why I don’t retouch things. It would ruin the trust, especially with the profusion of generative images today.

The structure of my work is meant to be analytical and conceptual, but the photographs also have a sense of warmth. The other people in the photographs are all my friends. Jerome, pictured here, is someone I’ve worked with on lots of projects. Hopefully these two sides of my work bounce off each other.

It’s beautiful to me that these pictures – which are made in a space of friendship, dialogue and intimacy, and involve a diverse range of people who are all in community together – can infiltrate a curatorial conversation about how the camera works. I hope my work can bring something warm to these places that can seem cold.

^{Figure (0X5A0918) was lent by Tate Americas Foundation, purchased with funds provided by Graham Steele and Ulysses de Santi in 2023. It is included in the collection display Sovereignty of Quiet.}

^{Paul Mpagi Sepuya is an artist based in Los Angeles. He talked to Figgy Guyver.}