Taro Michael Yamasaki is a
Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, and the eldest son of architect
Minoru Yamasaki
was an American architect, best known for designing the original World Trade Center in New York City and several other large-scale projects. Yamasaki was one of the most prominent architects of the 20th century. He and fellow architect Edward ...
.
["Who's who of Pulitzer Prize Winners"](_blank)
Elizabeth A. Brennan, Elizabeth C. Clarage. (Google eBook). page 209. Greenwood Publishing Group. 1999. Retrieved December 23, 2010
Early life
Taro Yamasaki was born on December 19, 1945, to Minoru Yamasaki and Teruko Hirashiki in Detroit, Michigan.
[Taro Yamasaki's Biography](_blank)
Retrieved December 23, 2010. He is the second of three children. His father, an architect, is best known for designing the
World Trade Center
World Trade Centers are sites recognized by the World Trade Centers Association.
World Trade Center may refer to:
Buildings
* List of World Trade Centers
* World Trade Center (2001–present), a building complex that includes five skyscrapers, a ...
; his mother was a pianist who attended the
Juilliard School
The Juilliard School ( ) is a private performing arts conservatory in New York City. Established in 1905, the school trains about 850 undergraduate and graduate students in dance, drama, and music. It is widely regarded as one of the most elit ...
. He attended high school at
Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
When his younger brother built a darkroom in their mother's house, Yamasaki began to experiment with photography. Taro was admitted to the
University of Michigan
, mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth"
, former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821)
, budget = $10.3 billion (2021)
, endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...
in
Ann Arbor where he majored in Journalism. He began taking photographs for the Journalism department's newspaper.
Career
Yamasaki dropped out of the University of Michigan in the spring of his senior year and in April 1968 moved to New York City where he embarked on a string of jobs including assistant kindergarten teacher and assistant to fashion photographer
William Klein.
He took a position at a
Community Action Program
In the United States and its territories, Community Action Agencies (CAA) are local private and public non-profit organizations that carry out the Community Action Program (CAP), which was founded by the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act to fight p ...
as a documentary photographer in migrant farm worker camps in western New York State where he realized that he wanted to pursue photography more seriously.
In the summer of 1971, Yamasaki moved from New York city to
Denver
Denver () is a consolidated city and county, the capital, and most populous city of the U.S. state of Colorado. Its population was 715,522 at the 2020 census, a 19.22% increase since 2010. It is the 19th-most populous city in the Unit ...
, Colorado, with his first wife, Anne. He worked as a taxi driver to support his family. He and Anne moved again in 1973 back to Michigan.
1981 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography
In Michigan, Yamasaki founded a carpentry company but quit the business in 1977 to work as a staff photographer at the ''
Detroit Free Press
The ''Detroit Free Press'' is the largest daily newspaper in Detroit, Michigan, US. The Sunday edition is titled the ''Sunday Free Press''. It is sometimes referred to as the Freep (reflected in the paper's web address, www.freep.com). It primari ...
''. He was hired by chief photographer Tony Spina and eventually worked alongside
David C. Turnley. While at the ''Free Press'', Yamasaki asked for permission to create, research and produce his own stories. The first story he conceived of on his own was a documentation of the daily lives of inmates in
Jackson Prison, the largest walled prison in the world with 52 acres inside the walls.
He then produced a lead story he had written, researched and photographed entirely on his own titled, "Jackson Prison: Armed and dangerous". The story was published on Sunday, December 14, 1980, as lead story of ''Free Press''
' Sunday Comment Front.
[Yamasaki, Taro. "Inside Jackson". ''Detroit Free Press''. December 14, 1980. Accessed December 23, 2010.] Yamasaki had "spent 10 days talking to the prison warden, officials, guards and inmates."
His writing focused on the inhumane conditions in which the inmates lived and the problems of overcrowding, violence and contraband.
Against the prison's rules, Yamasaki was able to convince the guards not to escort him anywhere and gained permission to travel almost everywhere inside the prison entirely on his own. According to Yamasaki, the guards allowed him to do this because they wanted him to portray the great danger of their jobs as accurately as possible. Because Yamasaki traveled around the prison without guards, he was able to gain the trust of the inmates who confided things to him they otherwise would not have, in many cases, because they wanted him to portray the incredible danger and inhumanity of their lives as honestly as possible. Despite the danger he faced from the inmates without the protection of prison guards, Yamasaki was able to produce an in-depth investigative report which the ''Detroit Free Press'' nominated for the
Pulitzer Prize. Subsequently, Yamasaki won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for the photographs he had taken inside Jackson Prison.
Yamasaki has won numerous other awards for his photojournalism work. In 1999 and 2000, he was a Distinguished Visiting Artist at The University of Michigan School of Art and Design.
Other work
In 1983 Yamasaki took a leave of absence from the ''Free Press'' to work on a book of architectural photography for Herring Press on notable buildings that were built out of
travertine
Travertine ( ) is a form of terrestrial limestone deposited around mineral springs, especially hot springs. It often has a fibrous or concentric appearance and exists in white, tan, cream-colored, and even rusty varieties. It is formed by a p ...
from a quarry near
Tivoli. During this year, he began receiving different magazine assignments from different
Time Inc
Time Inc. was an American worldwide mass media corporation founded on November 28, 1922, by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden and based in New York City. It owned and published over 100 magazine brands, including its namesake ''Time'', ''Sports Il ...
. magazines.
He got an assignment from ''
People
A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of prope ...
'' magazine to travel to Wales to photograph the village in which
Richard Burton
Richard Burton (; born Richard Walter Jenkins Jr.; 10 November 1925 – 5 August 1984) was a Welsh actor. Noted for his baritone voice, Burton established himself as a formidable Shakespearean actor in the 1950s, and he gave a memorable pe ...
was born. After returning from the assignment, he resigned from the ''Free Press'' and became a freelance magazine
photojournalist.
Yamasaki has completed hundreds of human interest stories for Time Inc. magazines such as ''
Time
Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, ...
'', ''
Life
Life is a quality that distinguishes matter that has biological processes, such as Cell signaling, signaling and self-sustaining processes, from that which does not, and is defined by the capacity for Cell growth, growth, reaction to Stimu ...
'', ''
Sports Illustrated
''Sports Illustrated'' (''SI'') is an American sports magazine first published in August 1954. Founded by Stuart Scheftel, it was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the National Magazine Award for General Excellence twi ...
'', ''
Forbes
''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also r ...
'', ''
Fortune'', ''
Money
Money is any item or verifiable record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts, such as taxes, in a particular country or socio-economic context. The primary functions which distinguish money are as ...
'', ''
Men's Journal'' and ''
People
A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of prope ...
''.
"Often his subjects have been children, living with the threats of poverty, disease, natural disasters, and armed conflict."
Some of the topics his documentary photography work have covered are:
*Children Victims of the war in
Nicaragua
Nicaragua (; ), officially the Republic of Nicaragua (), is the largest country in Central America, bordered by Honduras to the north, the Caribbean to the east, Costa Rica to the south, and the Pacific Ocean to the west. Managua is the countr ...
*
Romanian orphans
Orphanhood in Romania became prevalent as a consequence of the Socialist Republic of Romania's pro-natality policy under Nicolae Ceaușescu. Its effectiveness led to an increase in birth rates at the expense of adequate family planning and reproduc ...
*Refugees during the
Bosnian War
*Three cover stories on
Ryan White
Ryan Wayne White (December 6, 1971 – April 8, 1990) was an American teenager from Kokomo, Indiana, who became a national poster child for HIV/AIDS in the United States after his school barred him from attending classes following a diagnos ...
, a thirteen-year-old who had contracted AIDS, considered instrumental on substantially increasing awareness of people living with AIDS.
*
Rwanda (as the first Westerners to enter the country after the Rwandan Civil War in 1995)
*The lives of children caught in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Israelis ( he, יִשְׂרָאֵלִים, translit=Yīśrāʾēlīm; ar, الإسرائيليين, translit=al-ʾIsrāʾīliyyin) are the citizens and nationals of the State of Israel. The country's populace is composed primarily of Jew ...
"Children, Literacy and Mass Trauma Teaching in Times of Catastrophic Events And On Going Emergency Situations".
Taylor, Denny and Taro Yamasaki. Penn GSE Perspectives on Urban Education , Volume 4, Issue 2 , Feature Articles , Children and Mass Trauma. Retrieved December 23, 2010.
*Outside notorious serial-killer Jeffrey Dahmer
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer (; May 21, 1960 – November 28, 1994), also known as the Milwaukee Cannibal or the Milwaukee Monster, was an American serial killer and sex offender who killed and dismemberment, dismembered seventeen men and boys ...
's apartment shortly after he was arrested in 1991.
Family life
Yamasaki's first marriage ended in divorce in 1974. He has one daughter from that marriage. He married his second and current wife, Susan Waderlow, in 1978. Together, they have two boys. He has three grandchildren.
References
External links
taroyamasaki.com
{{DEFAULTSORT:Yamasaki, Taro
Living people
Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography winners
American people of Japanese descent
American photojournalists
University of Michigan alumni
Detroit Free Press people
American taxi drivers
People from Detroit
1945 births