Portraits of the Rainbow

World-renowned photographer Leslie Kee is best known for his fashion photography and portraits of celebrities like Madonna. He works worldwide and has based himself in Japan for the last 25 years. With the rising movement for LGBTQ rights in this country (although many people still have to live invisibly, and Leslie himself, being gay, can’t tell it to his family in Singapore), he embarks on an ambitious project to photograph ten thousand LGBTQ subjects for an exhibition: Out in Japan. The first portraits photo exhibition held in Nara, a conservative city in Japan, was poorly attended; but Leslie continues to take portraits.

Filmmaker Ayumi Nakagawa follows him during this process for a year as he takes the first thousand portraits. She highlights the life of four subjects: a same-sex couple trying to become parents, an advocate for HIV+ people and a transgender man who is recovering from his partner’s suicide. Along the way, Leslie finds himself also transformed by the life-changing experience.

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