Photographer Taro Yamasaki in his Burdickville home.

Taro Yamasaki, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, spent 9/11 like so many others — glued to the TV.

But his connection to the events, beyond the fact he flew from New York City on Sept. 10, is a bit more personal. His father, Minoru Yamasaki, designed the World Trade Center towers.

Calls flooded into Taro Yamasaki’s phone in the days following the attacks.

Reporters and friends wanted to know how he felt about watching his father’s towers collapse. They acted like it was a death in the family, he said.

“All I said was I’m not even thinking about the building,” he said. “I’m thinking about the 3,000 people that are killed.”

It took weeks for Yamasaki, who was consumed with an architecture book project, to return to New York City. He said a friend helped bring him to Ground Zero. Two police officers met them at a barricade around the destruction.

That planned 10-minute visit stretched to an hour.

The destruction shocked Yamasaki, who found it worse than any war zone he photographed. He recalls huge girders stuck in nearby buildings, as if flung by a giant. Three thousand people died, he said, repeating the number.

“So, I started thinking when I came home,” he said. “I don’t know when the thought hit me. I was thinking if I were one of those people, how would I feel about my life and how I lived my life?”

A career traveling for assignments brought Yamasaki into Romania, Bosnia and all over the world, but kept him away from his family. He decided to change that.

Yamasaki and his wife, Susan, long owned a wooded property in Burdickville, Michigan where Glen Lake and a sliver of Lake Michigan are visible from a ridge. In 2002, Yamasaki brought Susan, his sons and old carpentry tools there for a family project.

They camped through the summer and had a roofed building framed by September.

“I would say this is the most beautiful spot in the world, knowing obviously it isn’t the most beautiful spot in the world,” he said. “But for us it really felt that way.”

Yamasaki eventually converted the structure into a home, with help from his son, a self-trained architect. Susan Yamasaki planted gardens around its walls and up a hill. They find it difficult to leave the peaceful spot, but sometimes work still brings Taro Yamasaki away and, sometimes, back to 9/11.

Yamasaki did a project on undocumented workers who were employed at the Windows of the World, a restaurant atop the World Trade Center. He also photographed the “moving” 9/11 Tribute Center, where one room is adorned with pictures of all the attack’s victims.

Their eyes are visible in Yamasaki’s photographs, which can be viewed on his website.

“You can’t help just not looking into the eyes of all those people,” he said.

It’s “inconceivable” that all those people died, Yamasaki said.

“Even though those buildings were a part of my life for so long, I’m not thinking about the buildings,” he said. “It’s just amazing to me that I don’t. But I think about the people.”

Troutman writes for the Traverse City, Michigan, Record Eagle.