any fragment of him unhinges me
masters me
From "Breed Me," The Bronze Arms by Richie Hofmann
First
Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full as life was full, of them?
From âA Step Away from Them,â by Frank OâHara
In Untitled (2020-120), 2020, I mistake a cherry tree for a Pollock. A hand touches a hand. The hand touches the tree. Which is to say, an image of a hand touches an image of a hand which touches an image of a treeâin bloom. Someone turns away, another man covers his face. A disco ball in the back seat. I know who he is. I cannot tell you what you will see.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Untitled (2020-118), 2020
One is made aware of the flatness of their pictures before, instead of after, being made aware of what the flatness contains.
From âModernist Painting,â by Clement Greenberg
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmâdâsee here it isâ
I hold it towards you.
by John Keats
She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight.
From Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
I am fond of the work of artists who put pictures together, artists who put pictures and people together, and pictures of people, togetherâRobert Rauschenberg, Catherine Opie, Isa Genzken, Paul Mpagi Sepuya. I am fond of artists who put pictures together, to ask us about them.
Robert Rauschenberg, Rebus, 1955
Catherine Opie, Tony Greene's Studio, September 12, 1990, 1990/2024.
Isa Genzken, Spielautomat (Slot Machine), 1999
we remain in difference from each other, which is to say that weâre not quite one thing but instead a singular being made up of the many, or what Jean-Luc Nancy calls being-singular-plural: âBeing cannot be anything but being-with-one-another, circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence."
From After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life, by Joshua Chambers-Letson (xii)
PaJaMa, Glenway Wescott, Fire Island, c. 1940
When I think of âbeing-singular-plural,â I think of Glenway Wescott, Fire Island, c. 1940, a photograph by PaJaMa. Or maybe itâs the other way round: when I look at Glenway Wescott, Fire Island, c. 1940, I think about âbeing-singular-plural.â
A trio of artists better known individuallyâas the painters Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret FrenchâPaJaMa made photographs together, often while on vacation, often picturing them, their friends, and lovers. In Glenway Wescott, Fire Island, (currently in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art) a large piece of fabric blown back by a gust of wind almost obscures two figures on a beach. Covering them almost entirely, it sublimates them into a continuous plane of complicated folds, fleeting sculptural relief.
Only the head and right hand of the writer Glenway Wescott remain exposed. Like much of PaJaMaâs work, Glenway Wescott, Fire Island arises from an economy of means: two friends, a beach, a sheet. Despite, or perhaps because of this thrift, it becomes (at least for me) an object of philosophy, showing me how two become one, how we are never simply ourselves alone, how we are always âbeing-singular-plural.â
Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.
From Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
When interiority is found to be coextensive with the body an art of surfacesâof flatnessâwould seem to be inevitableâŠWe live in a world in which identity is form, and form is identityâŠOne of the primary lessons of modern art has been its paradoxical demonstration of the depth of surfaces. It is a lesson from which we still have much to learn.
From âNotes on Surface: toward a genealogy of flatness,â by David Joselit
There are many surfaces here: skin, mirrors, wood, stucco, tape, leaves, walls, glass, sheets of paper, sheets of fabric, curtains, drapes. Some are scrim veils through which light passes (Untitled (2020-138), 2020), others are opaque black, approximating darkness itself (Untitled (2018-032), 2020). In a few instances, a hole is cut to allow light, vision, the lens of a camera, to pass through. In Untitled (2020-118), 2020, a model drops to the floor, again, draped in a sheet. It is a dress. It is carved marble. It is a pool of blood.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Untitled (2020-138), 2020
Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Untitled (2018-032), 2020
Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Untitled (2020-118), 2020
Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat, 1793
But the man, too, sees his own physiognomy flash by. He gains his image more quickly here than elsewhere and also sees himself more quickly merged with this, his image. Even the eyes of passersby are veiled mirrors, and over that wide bed of the Seine, over Paris, the sky is spread out like the crystal mirror hanging over the drab beds in brothels.
From âMirrors,â The Arcades Project, by Walter Benjamin (537-8)
I donât have any Seine river like Monet . . . (Ed Ruscha)
From Stay Dead, by Natalie Shapero (5)
We say identity, like we know what it means. Identityâwhat about identify? I know him. I identify.
Hey, thatâs her. There she is, but I donât know them. Whatâs that say? Iâve never seen these beforeâŠ
The idea is simple: to put to use the huge amount of material generated by my photography addiction.
From SHOOT No. 1, by Paul Mpagi Sepuya
I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers.
From The Making of Americans, by Gertrude Stein
Iâve photographed many strangers,
From Sepuya, op. cit.
The thing that's important is to know that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.
From Diane Arbus: Revelations, by Diane Arbus
Installation view of Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Excerpts & Fragments, November 8âDecember 21, 2025 at 2413 Hyperion. Courtesy of Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND). Photo by Evan Bedford.
This feels like the internet, printed out.
A few years ago, I worked in an office with a huge table, like a parked station wagon. One day, my boss spread her research out across the table. Wikipedia articles, random blogs, and eBay listings filled the whole thing edge-to-edge and stayed there, growing and shifting, all summer long. âLooks like â has printed out the internet,â my friend said, when she came to pick me up for lunch.
I loved that. It feels naĂŻve, innocent, utopian, safe, full of faith and belief. Like we have some control. Human, like we could wrap our arms around it. The typed and printed urls, the exact dates: "MODERNPAUL," "craigslist.org," "March 20, 2005." This feels like the past. Twenty years? I can believe itâs been that long.
The camera as a phallus is, at most, a flimsy variant of the inescapable metaphor that everyone unselfconsciously employs. However hazy our awareness of this fantasy, it is named without subtlety whenever we talk about âloadingâ and âaimingâ a camera, about âshooting a filmââŠ
When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.
From On Photography, by Susan Sontag (11)
Francisco Goya, The Third of May, 1808
Niki de Saint Phalle creating Pirodactyl over New York, 1962
Chris Burden, Shoot [film still], 1971
We are surrounded by pictures.
I teach art history to artists in a former wallpaper factory in Culver City. What was once MGM is less than a mile away. The Wizard of Oz, Grand Hotel, An American in Paris, Gone with the Wind, Ben-Hur were all filmed right around the corner. At 2413 Hyperion, weâre just down the street from what was once the Disney animation studios, from 1926 to 1940. The birthplace of Snow White, all seven of the dwarves, and Mickey Mouse. It is now a parking lot, with a Gelsonâs, and a Starbucks.
When I am with him, smoking or talking quietly ahead, or whatever it may be, I see, beyond my own happiness and intimacy, occasional glimpses of the happiness of 1000s of others whose names I shall never hear, and know that there is a great unrecorded history.
From Selected Letters of E. M. Forster I: 1879-1920 (269)
It is not Hardy
the distinguished novelist and Hardy the poet, but one man
"interpreting life through the medium of the
emotions."
From âPicking and Choosing,â by Marianne Moore
You canât get at the thing itself, the real nature of the sitter, by stripping away the surface. You can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface. All that you can do is manipulate that surfaceâ
From Richard Avedon: Portraits, by Richard Avedon
Richard Avedon, Dovima with Diana Vreeland and Richard Avedon, 1950s
Between a reproduction of a Cranach portrait and an image of a lake behind tree trunks, there is a dirty blank rectangle that seems to be carved into the work, as if something had been peeled away to reveal at its periphery a whole mattress of superimposed fabrics. It is hard enough trying to figure out what lies on what when looking at the crest of this stack of fabric, but this gap within the overall tissue prompts one to ask: Where does it stop? Is it, as Dr. Seuss would say, turtles all the way down?
From âEyes on the Ground,â by Yve-Alain Bois
I am sure we both loved a different man. Because a lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if weâve married him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled in by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him.
From Less, by Andrew Sean Greer
Love is a memory now,
you said to me.
If antiquity can survive, love can too.
From âThe Bronze Arms,â by Richie Hofmann, op. cit.
Pictures are defined by their edges, where they end: pages, cells, frames, boxes, books, stills. Here, edges proliferate: the crops, the tears, the pasted sutures, the contact sheets, the gutters of the books and magazine spreads, the readymade dimensions of the Bristol boards, the standard copy paperâeven the facets of that disco ball.
Installation view of Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Excerpts & Fragments, November 8âDecember 21, 2025 at 2413 Hyperion. Courtesy of Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND). Photo by Evan Bedford.
How many frames per second? Five glass windows filled with Roses at Night, concrete walls metered by inset grooves. The room itself is a camera, a poem made of many stanzas, a picture, made of pictures. Looking at yourself, looking. Camera is Latin for room. Camera obscura is Latin for dark room. Is that something you already know?
Grant Klarich Johnson is a writer, educator, and curator based in Los Angeles.