In his formative university years, Heshiki was exposed to the candid snapshots of prominent Western photographers, such as Robert Frank and William Klein, whose work came to be described with the Japanese term konpora (an abbreviation of "contemporary photography”).
Heshiki owned a copy of Arbus's 1972 monograph, released as a part of an exhibition at MoMA in New York, and had the essay translated into Japanese.
[7] From his early years as an undergraduate, Heshiki gravitated towards photographing his hometown of Okinawa and was compelled by a strong necessity to capture images of the Okinawans who were often disregarded as insignificant and "nameless".
[10][11] Although translated into English ambiguously as “women”, the original title of the series “本土復帰” を拒絶する娼婦たちの現在 does not conceal their status as sex workers.
He also traveled far from the centers of action in Naha and base towns, and shot in remote areas such as the Daito Islands, Iheya, Yaeyama, and Miyako.
While his identity as a fellow Okinawan granted Heshiki some proximity to his subjects, he has repeatedly emphasized the importance of forging human connections for his shooting method.
He served as the photographer for Okinawan sculptor, painter and arts educator Kenshin Yamashiro in his book Gods of Nice Bottom Hairy (1979).
Heshiki also photographed sumi-e painter Michikio Kaneshiro, who was suffering from terminal diseases, and potter Takemi Shima.
Each issue included at least one photo series by Heshiki and features from fellow Okinawan photographers Mao Ishikawa, Tatsuhiko Kano, and Minoru Yamada, among others.
8, 1988) for which he photographed a peace statue constructed in front of a mass grave that was said to be vandalized in retaliation for the burning of the Hinomaru flag at the National Sports Festival in Okinawa (1987).
[18] Photographs of mass tombs and remnants of the war, banal scenes of daily life, landscapes, and festivals are all interwoven in Heshiki's critically acclaimed book Lungs of a Goat (2007).
[21] Just as Heshiki was beginning to gain greater recognition from his book and his feature in the exhibition Okinawa Prism 1872–2008 at the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, he died suddenly from pneumonia in 2009.