Taro Yamasaki

• Birth Name — Taro Michael Yamasaki • Born — 19 December 1945 • Birthplace — Detroit, Michigan, U.S. • Children — 3 • Occupation — Photographer • Awards — Pulitzer Prize (1981)

Taro Yamasaki was born on December 19, 1945, to Minoru Yamasaki and Teruko Hirashiki in Detroit, Michigan. He is the second of three children. His father, an architect, is best known for designing the World Trade Center; his mother was a pianist who attended the Juilliard School. 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 in Ann Arbor where he majored in Journalism. He began taking photographs for the Journalism department's newspaper.

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 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, 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.

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 from a quarry near Tivoli. During this year, he began receiving different magazine assignments from different Time Inc. magazines. He got an assignment from People magazine to travel to Wales to photograph the village in which Richard Burton 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, Life, Sports Illustrated, Forbes, Fortune, Money, Men's Journal and People. "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 • Romanian orphans • Refugees during the Bosnian War • Three cover stories on Ryan White, 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 • Outside notorious serial-killer Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment shortly after he was arrested in 1991.

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 four grandchildren. Yamasaki resides in Leelanau County, Michigan.