D-R-M / P-X / B-F-D

D.R.M.P X B.F.D. is a self-published zine by Paul Mpagi Sepuya made in collaboration with Caleb Kruzel, with design by Juan Pablo Rahal. It was published in January 2024, 50 pages, saddle-stitched.

The two met in 2021 through a tarot reading Kruzel gave Sepuya, then met in person in Los Angeles that fall for a series of shoots and gatherings that became the zine's source material. A second session the following spring produced cut-up collages built from Kruzel's own meme and behind-the-scenes archive, layering that vernacular material over Sepuya's studio photographs. A related body of the photographs was shown in the exhibition "D.R.M.P." at Bortolami Gallery, New York, in May-June 2022, with Kruzel's face kept out of frame or visible only through the screen of a phone pointed back at the camera.

Sepuya's studio practice works through mirrors, camera equipment and the bodies of collaborators and studio visitors to unsettle where the portrait subject ends and the photographer's process begins. This zine extends that method into a faster, more collaged, more explicitly intimate register than his gallery prints, made with a single named partner rather than a studio's revolving cast.