Fifteen years ago, Human Rights Watch came to celebrity portrait photography Platon’s New York studio with a pitch: They wanted him to help educate the public on the human rights crisis in Myanmar by photographing the people there. It was going to be a dangerous, months-long job with no pay. Platon’s wife had just given birth. He decided to go anyway.

The trip swerved the trajectory of Platon’s career, putting him on a years-long path of capturing the faces affected by and fighting against human rights violations. Now, Platon is releasing The Defenders: Heroes of the Global Fight for Human Rights, out May 1, an ambitious book cataloging 15 years of photographs of human rights activists and world leaders. The book is accompanied by a major exhibition of portraits at UTA Artists Space in Los Angeles, which is on view from May 3 to 25.

“You photograph them the way you photograph celebrities and world leaders and models,” Platon says of his subjects in Myanmar. “I photographed them not as victims; I photographed them as powerful, resilient human beings who refuse to be broken.”

When he came back from Myanmar, he went to The New Yorker and urged them to publish the photos. After The New Yorker ran the photos, the media started paying attention to the crisis. “It was the beginning of seeing human rights defenders and activists, not as victims, but as heroes,” he says. “It was a different mindset.”

Afterwards, Platon formed his own human rights foundation, which gave him the resources to travel to photograph the Egyptian Revolution, as well as to Russia, where he photographed dissidents being crushed by Vladimir Putin’s regime. He went to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, photographing people fighting against sexual violence. He spent a whole year crossing the Mexican-American border, taking photos of families torn apart by immigration policy. The Defenders is a compilation of all of this work over the last 15 years.

“I’ve spent so much time in front of powerful people. They say I photograph more world leaders than anyone in history now,” says Platon. “I’ve seen dandruff on world leaders. I see if they’re nervous and their eyelids flutter. I feel their pulse. People ask me a lot: What do I think power is? I think power is something that if you are lucky to acquire any power at all, you have to share it. You have to use it to help others.”