His father, an architect, is best known for designing the World Trade Center; his mother was a pianist who attended the Juilliard School.
[4] When his younger brother built a darkroom in their mother's house, Yamasaki began to experiment with photography.
[3] 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 Michigan, Yamasaki founded a carpentry company but quit the business in 1977 to work as a staff photographer at the Detroit Free Press.
[3][9] He then produced a lead story he had written, researched and photographed entirely on his own titled, "Jackson Prison: Armed and dangerous".
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.