“When I was doing research, most of the stuff I found was either porn or just really stereotypical racist stuff about the queer Asian-American community,” she recalled. Her goal was to make more nuanced representations available, and in turn, to augment our collective imagination for possible Asian American identities.

Starting in San Francisco, she put out a call for subjects willing to answer a brief questionnaire about how they identify, sit for a portrait, and have it added to the project’s website. From there, she expanded to Los Angeles and New York, adding video interviews to the process. In the years following, she spent months traveling throughout the American South and Midwest (where it wasn’t as easy to find willing subjects). Often collaborating with LGBTQ-centered events and organizations in order to reach the right people, Nakano would also set up an Eventbrite page with possible time slots and simply wait to see who arrived.

The result is a massive archive of people digging into their identities, allowing themselves to fully be seen. There's Jayden Thai, the trans Vietnamese American from Washington, D.C.; Lolan Buhain Sevilla of Brooklyn, the Pinoy queer butch whose preferred pronoun is listed as "mam-sir"; and Un Jung, the Korean-American lesbian who identifies as an "alpha femme," among a spectrum of others. Earlier this month, Nakano also released Visible Resilience, the first Visibility Project book, which features 80 of her portraits since starting the project in 2009 -- as well as excerpts from video interviews, and even a syllabus for how to teach the Visibility Project in school and create safe spaces in classrooms while doing it. (Nakano decided to add this aspect, created in collaboration with Monna Wong and Tracy Ngyuen, after realizing that the project was already regularly being included on college syllabi.)

For Nakano, though, the collection of portraits is about much more than simply shifting the narrative -- it's about saving lives. “Not being visible is dangerous," she says. "Not seeing models or hearing stories or seeing reflections of yourself over time and being oppressed without visibility -- just that within itself takes its toll.”

As commonly cited, studies have shown that over 40 percent of transgender individuals have at some point attempted suicide, and transgender youth who are not supported by their family when coming out are 13 times more likely to attempt suicide.

“Theres a whole generation of people who are not here now because of AIDS," says Nakano. "And I think there’s a whole generation and demographic of people that we’re losing to violence and suicide.”

With this in mind, Nakano’s primary goal has always been making the affirming images and interviews accessible to as many people as possible. Although she is currently not actively photographing for the project, her next step is to have all of the interviews transcribed and translated into the language of each subject's ancestry. These translations will then inform an evolving multi-lingual glossary of terms that people can use to, say, come out to their relatives in a way that makes sense to them. As Nakano noted, this project has taught her that visibility doesn't always take the form of the image -- often, it's words.

“I think that visibility can be enacted in many, many different ways,” she says.

To view the Visibility Project and purchase a book, visit VisbilityProject.org.