Taro Yamasaki’s lessons behind the lens

By F. Josephine Arrowood
Sun contributor

Meeting Taro Yamasaki for the first time, one would never guess that this soft-spoken, bespectacled man with a bit of gray in his beard wasn’t a typical Up North transplant with his slice of heaven amongst Leelanau’s trees, beaches and lake scenes. Then he begins to talk about his life’s work as a photojournalist, whose strong, often beautiful pictures paradoxically convey searing images that indict those who not only perpetrate violence upon their fellow beings, but also those of us who stand by, silent or indifferent or ignorant.

Many of his stories depict the most vulnerable of subjects: those who cannot speak out or defend themselves against the indignities of deprivation, violence and even death. Wounded, mutilated, neglected children of wars in Nicaragua, Bosnia, Romania and the Middle East. Convicted felons and their keepers, inflicting cruel but not unusual punishment upon each other. A young boy suffering from a misunderstood, fatal autoimmune disease. Wild horses slaughtered by the tens of thousands in the American West.

He is the son of a famous architect father and a Julliard School-trained musician mother, and an award-winning professional in his own field. Yet this is not a guy who ever courted safety and security, or got hung up on the chance of being rich or famous, or who dutifully put in his time and said, “I got mine, Jack.” This is someone whose deep and abiding humanity is portrayed through skilled eyes and a well-honed craft, who continues to push himself at age 66 to create pictures in new ways to show everyday people’s complex lives.

Even at the very beginning of his work in the late 1960s, the largely self-taught photographer sought to move past the barrier that can exist between himself and the subject-as-object. In his first major project in upstate New York, he spent a summer at a black migrant workers’ camp, at the invitation of a VISTA worker there.

Yamasaki says, “I spent the first couple of weeks just getting to know people. I had one camera, one lens. I realized that if you can make a connection with whoever you’re photographing, and if you can make them comfortable with you and have them realize that you want to photograph them as people, not as some ‘immigrant farm workers,’ they will be totally different — and I think those photos were different. So many people [as subjects] are suspicious, they’re not open. I could communicate about people what others didn’t even see; they see the stereotype, not the people.” He pauses, then says, “Those pictures are still some of my favorite photos I’ve ever taken.”

As a young Japanese-American growing up in the post-World War II Detroit area, he witnessed plenty of bigotry, though was fortunate to elude most of it personally. “Growing up as a minority gave me a different perspective on how people are treated. Even though my father was a well-respected architect, he faced a lot of discrimination. I was able to escape a lot of that stuff, but social justice was incredibly important to my father, so we grew up thinking about that; we had parents who were very, very aware of what’s fair.

“My father was totally against the idea of just working to make money. … He really did believe that, when you’re privileged, you do what you can do to help your fellow human beings. We didn’t have a lot of money when I was growing up, but … we all got really good educations. You have education and certain abilities, but not for personal aggrandizement. We grew up with a real social conscience.”

His father, Minoru Yamasaki, best known as the designer of the World Trade Center, had already made the cover of Time magazine, and was friends with its editor, by the time young Taro (a journalism school dropout) had decided to pursue photography as his own métier. Yet the son proudly relates that he never used his dad’s fame or connections to get his foot in the door. In fact, it would be seven years between his project with the migrant workers, and his first “real” job as a staff photographer at the Detroit Free Press in 1977. In that interval, he worked as a kindergarten aide, a fashion photographer’s assistant, a laborer, and a taxi driver, pursuing his real passion in his off-hours. Moving back to Detroit, he also did a four-year stint as a carpenter building houses, and didn’t have time for photography at all.

At the Free Press, “I was the latest hire, so ended up doing the interior design section with Lillian Jackson Braun [who later wrote the mystery novel series, The Cat Who…].” When new executive editor David Lawrence asked him if he liked his job, Yamasaki replied that he didn’t want to simply take pictures of others’ stories; he wanted to do his own stories. Shortly after, he proposed an idea to go into maximum security Jackson Prison to document the overcrowded and inhumane conditions there, and the effects on both inmates and prison workers.

At first, he was escorted everywhere by guards, but soon realized that he wouldn’t see or learn much from wary prisoners that way. “I said to the guards, ‘The only way you can show me that you’ve got the worst job in America is to let me walk around by myself.’ They said, ‘OK, we’ll escort you in the gate at 7:30, then you’re totally on your own for the next 14 hours, and then we’ll escort you out — and we hope you’re not killed in the meantime!’” The resulting story, “Jackson Prison: Armed and Dangerous,” written and photographed by Yamasaki, appeared on December 14, 1980, and won the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography in 1981.

“When my dad got the call [that Taro had won the Pulitzer], he said he sat on his hotel room bed and cried for half an hour. ‘My son isn’t such a bum, after all!’” He laughs. “He was happy that I became a photographer, but I don’t think he ever thought that being a newspaper photographer in Detroit was gonna go anywhere.”

In 1983, he made the decision to leave the Free Press. He’d been on a leave of absence, and was getting steady and increasingly interesting assignments from, among others, People magazine. One of his most memorable and ground-breaking assignments, with writer Ron Arias, exposed the horrific consequences inflicted on civilians, especially children, during the Nicaraguan civil war, which the United States helped fund through its secret Iran-Contra scheme.

In 1984, a young boy in Kokomo, Indiana, developed AIDS from a blood transfusion, and was shunned by virtually that entire fear-raddled community. Yamasaki’s extended and sensitive photographs documented Ryan White’s move to Cicero, Ill., his transformation into a spokesperson for those with HIV, and his health struggles (he died at age 18 in 1990).

One photo from this time shows the boy looking like a wizened old man, bundled and hunched at the kitchen table. The family had just left Kokomo, with financial help from rock star Elton John.

Yamasaki explains, “He had been a total outcast in Kokomo, and had not yet met anybody in Cicero. It was 90 degrees, really humid in August. … He would go warm his hands by the stove. We thought he was dying, then people started knocking on his door: ‘Here’s cookies, welcome to the neighborhood.’ He became this incredibly popular kid; he started gaining weight, he gets to be a regular kid.” There’s a shot of Ryan at the doctor’s office, when the doctor had asked the photographer to step out of the room during the exam. “Ryan said, ‘I want Taro to stay here, ‘cause this is what AIDS looks like.’ Very soon after that, he died.”

At Ryan’s deathbed, Yamasaki had a chance to continue photographing the family and friends — including celebrities like Elton John — gathered around. But at some point, he says, he chose to put the camera down, to be a friend and mourner and participant, even though it meant he might not get the one great picture that every professional photographer strives to capture. And he didn’t regret his decision: an integral part of his philosophy and his approach to his work that has been in place from the beginning.

On September 11, 2001, when the tragedy at the World Trade Center unfolded, he was riveted to his TV set like everyone else. He had just returned from New York after a working on a project.

“On Sunday, I was standing in a friend’s apartment on 16th St, looking down 8th or 9th Ave. There’s the World Trade Center, looming above everything, but we weren’t even talking about it, because you know, it was always there. On Monday, I went home with all my equipment, and on Tuesday morning my sister called: ‘Turn on the television.’ ‘What channel?’ ‘Doesn’t matter — any channel.’

“I got a lot of calls from the media: ‘Your dad’s buildings — what are you thinking? [Minoru Yamasaki had died in 1986.]’ My one stock answer was, ‘I’m not thinking about the buildings, I’m thinking about 3,000 people who just got killed.’ Of course, I was sad about the buildings, but 3,000 people! I started thinking about if I was one of these 3,000 and I could see my death coming at me like a freight train — what would I think about the life I’d lived? In many ways, I would be unhappy with the time I’d spent … with my wife Susan doing most of the childrearing, the time I’d been gone — I was gone way, way too much. I just really felt I’d spent so much less time with my kids than I should’ve.”

He gestures around the lush gardens that Susan has created out of the former northern forest. “We had this place that had a driveway and nothing else. I said, ‘I want to build a building here,’ and I wondered if the boys would help me (they were in college). In May 2002, I gave them a couple of 2×4 cutoffs and a handful of 16s and said, ‘OK, learn how to nail!’ ‘cause we weren’t gonna use any kind of nail guns! We spent four months building this place,” which was supposed to be just a storage barn, but which later became the main house.

“This place has become a huge part of my life, and it’s a lot of work. Every single decision of the design came from me, and even though I didn’t put it all together, I was here all the time, working.”

He was also still seeking out subjects for his lens, hoping to share their stories. In late 2005, he and an educator went to the Middle East to document the everyday lives of both Israelis and Palestinians whose lives are twisted and strictured by the age-old conflicts there. It’s a complex story, with many sides to it, but he finds his focus most often on the children of both societies, showing the prices they must pay for the sins of their elders. In one, he depicts Palestinian kids, “who have to go through the gamut of automatic weapons every day on their way to … and from school,” in Hebron, on the West Bank.

“Look at these kids’ faces,” he instructs, pointing at a boy near the concrete and concertina-wire barrier, whose crumpled posture and wrapped arms speak poignantly of fear and defeat. In another series, he shows the tense faces of Israeli children enacting emergency drills, in case rockets fired from the Palestinian side should land on their school. In a third series at an all-girls’ school in Hebron (he created four in all for the project), he shows fifteen-year-old Dua as she plays soccer, laughs with classmates, and rapturously emotes a dramatic poem with her teacher. “[You] don’t see pictures of Muslim girls just acting like girls — here they’re just being kids,” he says with satisfaction.

What’s the next step for an award-winning photographer who has covered and helped create so many of the important stories of our times through his riveting images? Currently, he’s planning a film documentary project in the northern Michigan area, and shares his thoughts on how photojournalism has changed over the past couple of decades.

“It’s really hard now to do still-photography documentary and get it seen. There are very, very few magazines that are doing the kind of things People did in the ’80s and ’90s … People magazine had a readership of 35 million people. Time magazine, every once in a while, does this beautiful layout of something important,” using their own staff photographers on limited stories, as do most other publications these days.

He continues, “I want to do still photography, but I also want to do video documentaries.” Last year, he completed a Japanese public television project, and also works on documentary advertising campaigns, which allows him the means to pursue his own stories. “It’s not my photographs that are so important. It’s to be able to show things, for people to be able to see, for people to know about,” like the hardships that still exist in beautiful places like northern Michigan, or the orphans that no one wants to adopt.

When asked if he thinks the explosion in documentary film making is related to “the people’s history” movement, he says “It’s another way to tell the story — maybe the way to tell the story now, if you want to effect change.” For more on his work, visit his website, www.taroyamasaki.com.