Darrin Alfred. Photo by Trevor Brown Jr.

Darrin Alfred, curator of architecture and design at the Denver Art Museum, likes a touch of rebellion in his art: Over the years, he’s added many a social-justice poster to his employer’s archives. That air of resistance is also evident in Alfred’s personal collection of zines created by Los Angeles photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya between 2005 and 2007. Today, Sepuya’s work is widely celebrated for eroding the barrier between photographer and subject, but his self-published series—playfully titled Shoot: This is a Magazine and part of the groundswell of zines made by queer creatives starting in the early aughts—gave the young artist a chance to share his budding craft outside the strictures of mainstream media. “Zines are more of a creative expression, as opposed to a commercial endeavor,” Alfred says. “They’ve always been sort of a means of protest against censorship.” Each edition of Shoot contains images of a solitary male (the fifth issue features Sepuya’s own self-portraits), revealing a more intimate, less polished side of queer masculinity. “They represent my community,” Alfred says, “in a way that it typically wasn’t represented.”