Depth of Field

We train our lens on the magazine's founding photo editor for some long overdue exposure

- CAT AUER

Few jobs are as readymade to inspire envy among lovers of women than that of PLAYBOY photo director. Yet little has been written about the magazine’s founding “picture editor,” Vincent T. Tajiri, who for 15 stratospheric years oversaw our photo department. During his tenure Tajiri watched the print run top 7 million, thanks in large part to the teeming photographer and stringer ecosystem he developed. Praised as a gentleman and a deep thinker by his former employees (and called a cocksucker by Hunter S. Thompson; more on that later), he remained an elusive figure among the many outsize personalities of playboy’s early years. So who was Vince Tajiri?

Born in southern California in 1919, Tajiri was a teenager when his older brother Larry, who went on to be a distinguished journalist, brought home a 35-mm SLR camera from a reporting trip to Asia. Vince, who’d been priming himself to be a writer, fell in love with the medium. “I knew very little about photography then,” he told Popular Photography in 1968, “but I shot promiscuously and uninhibitedly.” At the same time he was developing his photography skills, he wrote prolifically for English-language papers that served the Japanese American community.

At the age of 18 he moved to San Francisco to work for one such daily, Nichibei Shinbun. The previous year he had created Rigmarole, an intermittent Nichibei column that variously covered the nisei (Americans who, like Tajiri, were born to immigrant parents from Japan), sports stats, movies and any other topic that caught Tajiri’s attention.