The whir of the zoom, the iconic click of the shutter. Something sought and captured. Or is it? Most of us take hundreds of photos with our phones, and each have our own reasons for doing so. It usually has to do with remembering something special, beautiful, or even practical. The other day a friend’s child said to me, “Why don’t you just take a picture, so you can remember?”

What is it that you want to remember?

Asako: I want to remember when and where I have taken each photograph, so that I can record the moment, but often I cannot remember where I was or when I took it. Strangely sometimes, I don't even remember the images.

I love how you play with lines within the landscape or cityscape, reflections, blurs, sharp focus, and partially obscured views. As the photographer, you were there at the precise point of light, action, emotion, human existence, geography. The photograph is a record of this point, but it is also an invitation to come and inhabit that space.

Do you have a favorite place to photograph? Or a favorite subject? What is it that calls to you to be captured (or set free)?

Asako: I take pictures of people, cityscapes, landscapes, and everything that I see. When I meet a moment, I am captured by that moment, without a thought.

For the last 30 years in San Francisco, I have often taken pictures in an area south of China Basin called Mission Bay and towards Potrero Point, where the iron and steel industry developed and which became a major shipyard and port for shipping in the 1860s. For a long time, the ruins of huge buildings and warehouses were left behind.

However, in the last few years, the Mission Bay and Dogpatch areas have developed, and people have renovated the old buildings for business. I am no longer able to get to the areas close to the water. So I drive along the Bay towards the south—India Basin, Bayview, and Hunters Point. Third Street used to be called Railroad Avenue, where industrial workers lived, and the area was developed with working-class homes. I love the characteristic streetscapes and can smell the time and vitality of people’s lives there.

One of the things that people love about photographs is the way that a picture can transport the viewer, especially to places we may never have the chance to go ourselves. You have described how the photos in your recent publication, All of It, Tinged, were taken while traveling around northern Japan.

Could you speak about your journey—what were you searching for, and what did you find?

Asako: As I shared at celebration of the book, All of It, Tinged, I felt Diana’s story and my images share similar uncertainties and searching for the light.

Diana uses the phrases “like” or “as if” to describe a person or personality in her writing. In my photography, the images of place, nature, or landscape also have the same element: “like” or “as if” they are somewhere or something else rather than what I saw in reality. For example, the wood floor of the Dojo seems like water and conjures the ocean in my imagination.

I feel as if my photography of the outside world reflects the inner landscape of Diana’s story. I am so honored to have my images with Diana’s words in this book.

The selected images in All of It, Tinged are from my body of work, Marooned Dream, subtitled The Aspect of Anxieties, shot in the late ’80s and earlier ’90s in Japan. Back then, I was a student at San Francisco Art Institute. Created in different times and places, there seemed to be no connection to Diana’s story, yet, I felt her story and my images share similar uncertainties and searching for the light.

After several trips to my own country, Japan, I began to print as my graduation project. As I edited with the support of my teacher, Hank Wessel, it slowly became clear what the title of this body of work was. I felt I was finding the connection to my country and identity through my trip to Japan. Also, the ’80s in Japan were booming, and everywhere the atmosphere and surfaces were beautiful. But I couldn’t help sense some emptiness beneath. So images through the journey reflect anxieties of both myself and my own country.

What are your preferred tools and materials as a photographer? Do you have a favorite camera that travels everywhere with you?

Asako: Since I take my camera everywhere I go, my 35mm camera is the best size. I have owned several models, but I broke my favorite camera, my father’s Rollei point-and-shoot camera, during my last trip to Japan right before Covid hit. Since then, I have gone back to my first camera, Nikon F3, with a 55mm lens.

What artists do you look to when thinking about your life and work?

Asako: I can name several photographers I was strongly inspired by; the most influential photographers are Daido Moriyama and Hank Wessel.

Hank was my instructor at the San Francisco Art Institute. When I took his class “Understanding Photography,” I learned through his critiques of students, “Why does this image work, and this one does not?” Through independent study with him, I learned everything: how to look at negatives and proofs, how to print work efficiently, etc. And I saw him shoot in a second when he saw something; his Leica M6 was like part of his body. His images make us feel the warm light, and the shadow is tender. Hank would call me, “Let’s look at your dark and heavy stuff.” His keen messages have stayed with me since the beginning of my path in photography.

Daido Moriyama’s images are powerful, extreme, vivid, contrasty, and make me exhausted. I feel his profound human nature and beauty keenly. He also shoots rapidly; his 35 mm camera is like his eye. A long time ago, when I had no time to do photography, Daido said, “Keep shooting, every day, anything. You will have time for your photography someday.’’ I have taken these words to heart.

At Drop Leaf Press, we love to explore intersectionality, the rich space where one thing meets and overlaps with another. As our press has grown and evolved over time, we have come to appreciate how our personal lives shape our work. A full time job can limit the time we have to make art, but it can also ignite new interests. Relationships can create filters through which we experience and interpret the world. Race, gender, what we look like, and how we choose to identify ourselves too often determines how others see us and what opportunities are available.

What are some of the roles or identities that you find yourself working with or against in your life and work? How do you choose to explore, embrace, or reject those intersections?

Asako: My roles are a mother and teacher. I am Japanese, a single parent of an African American-Japanese son, and an artist.

Thirty-seven years ago, I came to the United States, and I planned to stay with a family just for one year as a live-in nanny and a student. Even though my student visa expired, I chose to stay. It turns out I have lived in the US much longer than I lived in Japan.

In our home in Tokyo, we often had guests from foreign countries. My uncle was a sculptor; my grandfather was a painter; my father was a scientist, poet, and professor; my mom had a strong belief in the Catholic religion, and my whole family was Catholic. Because of my dad, I was familiar with poetry, and one of my sisters became a poet. Traveling in the northern part of Japan, I longed for my favorite poet, Kenji Miyazawa, who lived in the area. His pure sensibility of words deeply inspired me.

I was a black sheep among my five sisters, and I had the opportunity to find myself far away from them. Without realizing it, I feel like I have embraced everything I was exposed to in my childhood through my family’s professions, roles, beliefs, and visions. As if I were a seed from Japan, growing in Western soil.

As a former preschool teacher myself, I am fascinated by the way young children add language to their vocabulary, collecting words and building their understanding of the world bit by bit. Seeing a child use a word successfully for the first time, you start to realize how words capture thoughts and feelings, making them manageable, but also powerful.

How has working with young children as a Montessori teacher influenced your work as an artist? Are there particular aspects of early childhood that you find fascinating?

Asako: Early childhood is the most fascinating age to me. Dr. Maria Montessori said, “It is the child who absorbs material from the world about him/her; he/she who molds it into the wo/man of the future. All of us must combine in respect and help for this delicate work of formation, which the little child carries on the depth of a profound psychological mystery.” One of the most important elements in a Montessori preschool is a “prepared environment.” Following Dr. Maria Montessori’s belief and philosophy, with my passion for art, I have been enjoying creating works and helping children’s great constructive work for twenty-three years.

Drop Leaf Press was born out of a desire to come together and make things. Over the years we have held gatherings dedicated to handicrafts. We’ve experimented with book arts, collages, embroidery, knitting, cooking and baking, mending, and handwritten collaborative writing projects. We love the sense of texture and delight that trying out different crafts and processes brings to our relationship to each other as editors and to the work that we publish.

What brings you joy as a maker and artist outside of photography?

Asako: I love drawing, painting, sculpture with clay, sewing, Japanese calligraphy, and origami.

One final question. If it’s not too abstract to ask, can you talk about light and shadow? Is there anything else that comes up again and again in your work?

Asako: As I mentioned earlier, I take pictures of people, cityscapes, and landscapes. When I meet a moment, I am captured by that moment, without a thought.

Looking at the printed images, I notice that the light and shadow create and compose the particular atmosphere only at that moment. If I shot a second later or earlier, and one inch to the side or above or below, this moment might not have ever happened.

The light and shadow are magical.

Interview written for Drop Leaf Press by Jill Tomasetti. All images belong to Asako Shimazaki, and can be found in her collection, Marooned Dream, or in her publications, Ayu no Kaze and All of It, Tinged.

Asako Shimazaki was born in Tokyo, Japan. In 1984, Shimazaki left Japan and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and in 1991 completed her BFA in photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. Shimazaki exhibits her work in both the US and Japan, and is represented in the permanent collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

In Ayu no Kaze, published by TBW Books in 2019, Shimazaki returns to the scenery of Japan, with pictures that “grab us by their distinctive and particular vision and persuade us that what this photographer saw was both marvelous and true” (Sandra S. Phillips, 2018). Most recently, Shimazaki’s photography has been published by Drop Leaf Press in a curated poetic narrative, All of It, Tinged, with author Diana Fisher.

Notable among Shimazaki’s collections are Marcus’ Single Digits, a series documenting the first ten years of her son’s life, and Untitled, an intimate and moving glimpse into a family in mourning. Shimazaki’s work, through spontaneous and intimate portraits and shifting cityscapes and landscapes, seeks to capture light.

Shimazaki lives in San Francisco and has taught at a Montessori preschool since 1998.