The celebrity status that photographer Zanele Muholi has come to enjoy is paradoxical, considering the relatively incendiary tenor of their earlier work vis-à-vis the general atrophy of activist art in South Africa. The assertiveness of Muholi’s photographs appear untrammeled by bourgeois conventions, offering instead the photographic outspokenness and sensuality of Black queer lives. It beckons many of us to reckon with the scandalized existence of Black lesbian, queer, and trans people, especially in the South African townships.

Muholi’s iconoclasm isn’t a consequence of the new generation’s