The camera is never offstage in Orifice + Aperture. Across 21 plates, Paul Mpagi Sepuya keeps the apparatus — handheld or mounted on a tripod — inside the frame, so that every image of intimacy is also an image of photography making its own conditions visible. Mirrors and screens extend the studio into a set of overlapping surfaces; the lens, named twice in the title, becomes both instrument and motif. The result is a body of studio studies in which portraiture, self-representation, and queer sociality are worked through together rather than treated as separate subjects.

This is collaborative picture-making. Sepuya’s sitters are participants in the construction of the image, and the photographs register that exchange as it unfolds — bodies, reflections, and equipment arranged and rearranged before the shutter is released. The book’s sequence turns on these provisional encounters, letting the viewer follow how a photographic subject comes into being rather than presenting a finished portrait. Moments of intimacy and gestures of self-fashioning share the page with the physical facts of the medium.

TBW Books issued the collection in 2022 as a muslin-wrapped casebound volume of 56 pages, measuring roughly 25 by 34 centimeters, each copy signed and numbered in an edition of 500. The scale and the cloth binding give the plates room to function as objects in their own right, and the numbering foregrounds the book as a considered edition rather than a mass-produced catalogue.

For collectors attuned to contemporary photography’s inquiry into its own structures, the volume belongs with the work it documents. Sepuya’s practice has made the studio a site where desire, collaboration, and the mechanics of the camera are thought together; Orifice + Aperture gathers that thinking into a single sustained sequence, at a scale that rewards close looking.