Sepuya 2
I just said something, written two days ago, about Sepuya self-censoring his images with “hard-ons” in them, in anticipation of censorship. The rest of his work might be nude, but covered. Many not quite nude.
I’m not sure. And so I think about who can say what where, and what counts as porn, or “illicit images” as some ambiguous and lazy people call them, and images that take place digitally now.
In this image, posted by Sepuya today: An image of Sepuya’s work, exhibited at a gallery, has been taken down from Instagram, with no option to contest the removal.
When I walked into a little gay store across from a museum to buy little gay zines, the door was locked and a dog barked at me. The owner walked up to the door and picked up his dog, saying, “he’s friendly. Do you want to help us put up our dildo collection?” and led me through a little hallway, into a room labelled “creature cocks.” And I looked at books. “I’m working on a photo project,” I said, and the owner said, “things aren’t done much on print anymore. It’s all digital these days. People only print nostalgically.” And I thought of gay culture as an online image culture.
Sepuya takes photos of queer black bodies. As someone mentioned in the comments of that removal post, “Instagram/Meta...especially love censoring bodies of color.”