This year, I had dinner one night with a camera friend I’d recently met, during her monochrome exhibition. On a whim, we decided to apply for “Colors” together.
Colors is a unique exhibition where you choose one of six colors — red, yellow, white, black, green, or blue — and shoot photos based on that theme. You’re grouped with other photographers who picked the same color, and visitors on the day of the show vote for their favorite team. The team with the most votes wins. My two friends chose white and black, so I deliberately went for what seemed like the hardest one: yellow.
But it turned out that applications had already closed, and I’d given up on it. Then a cancellation opened up, and I jumped in. I signed up to show three pieces. I applied in early May, with a submission deadline in mid-August. It sounds like plenty of time, but really it isn’t. I wanted to shoot specifically for Colors rather than pull from my existing stock as much as possible.
Since the exhibition is called Colors, I knew from the start I wanted the content to play off that name. It might sound a bit predictable, but I decided to make it about LGBTQ themes. I started working out the details, put out a call for models through Instagram Stories — but hardly anyone responded. That pushed me to ask myself: what I’m trying to do here, what does it really mean to me? So I scrapped the plan and started over. I wasn’t going to drop the LGBTQ theme, but instead of reaching for something huge, I decided to start from something close to me.
When I thought about LGBTQ people close to me, I was lucky — I have a lesbian couple as close friends, and my best friend Ben and I actually officiated their wedding.
These two have a special kind of magic. They share an incredibly deep connection — something like mother and daughter, like girlfriends, like older and younger sister, and at the same time like comrades fighting side by side. Regardless of same-sex or opposite-sex, they’re deeply involved in each other’s lives, living it like a shared project. That’s what I saw in them.
Today, not just in Japan but all over the world, marriages between men and women feel really fragile. The slightest thing and it’s straight to divorce. Even just dating feels that unstable, that easily broken. And then I look at these two, and they seem like the most human, most husband-and-wife version of a couple I’ve ever seen. I wanted to capture that in photographs.
The image I had in my head going in didn’t quite click once we were actually shooting, and I got a little lost. But they were so generous, showing me so many different sides of themselves. And right at the very end, they showed me something that made me go, “This is it!” — this is what a married couple is. That was the shot.
We did the shoot in June, and it was brutally hot. Despite that, these two gave it everything. I can’t say thank you enough — I’m genuinely grateful from the bottom of my heart.
The shoot wrapped up fine, and I moved into editing. And here too, the color and mood weren’t coming out the way I’d imagined. Honestly, I started to panic.
I usually shoot in a way that barely uses retouching software at all. But the team I joined for Colors was the yellow team, and from the start I’d chosen to lean into retouching — and the result was coming out very different from what I’d first pictured. This was clearly on me. The photos themselves were fine — perfect, even. So what now?
I knew that in moments like this, flailing around trying every fix is worse than just stepping away. But I couldn’t get it out of my head. And then it hit me: don’t add — subtract. After that the edit was over in no time. The work was done, and I sent it in right away.
The exhibition opened.
The response was so much better than I’d imagined. The thing that stuck with me most was what one older woman said:
“Seeing this, I feel like the way I look at gay people and same-sex couples has completely changed. They’re no different from any other couple.”
When I heard that, I nearly cried. That — that was exactly what I’d wanted to hear most.
So, once again, I want to say thank you to the two of them.
Thank you.
