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Henry Sukezo Takayoshi was an avid photographer for over 70 years, and in 1987 was one of only two Japanese-Americans in Seattle affiliated with the Photographic Society of America. He was mostly self-taught and strove to capture moments in the right setting and light. Starting in 1947, he exhibited with camera clubs and photographic societies throughout Washington and other Western states. He won his first prize from the Southwest Washington Fair in 1951 and continued to win awards from local camera clubs as well as the prestigious National Newspaper Snapshot Award in 1964. Takayoshi was also shown in the Seattle Times in their Snapshot Contest segment on multiple occasions from 1948 on.

Takayoshi was born in Tsuwano, Japan, in 1899 and was raised by his grandparents Seiichi and his wife who ran a store. Seiichi was an artist who specialized in family crests and might have influenced Henry Takayoshi's ideas of design and balance. Henry Takayoshi's father, Seinosuke had immigrated to the United States in 1899 by way of Hawaii to Port Blakely where he worked in a saw mill, later he started a green house company with Otto Petersen on Bainbridge Island. Henry joined his family in the U.S. in 1915, and began assisting his father in the family's green house business. The next year, he acquired his first camera and began a life-long interest in photography. Beside the green house business he worked at the Port Blakely Mill and in logging and fish camps in the area. In 1927 married Kikuyo Tokuhisa. They operated the family greenhouse business at Pleasant Beach until World War II when they were forced to relocate to the internment camp, Minidoka. Many of Henry's pre-World War II photographs were burned or destroyed by the photographer in 1942 when soldiers and FBI agents arrived to search Japanese-American families and their homes. After the war, he worked for Bake Rite Bakery in Seattle, retiring in 1965. He received a formal apology and reparations from the U.S. government in 1991. Most of Takayohi's work is in black and white, taken with a 35mm Zeiss Ikon camera.

A retrospective exhibit of his work was held in 1987 at the Bainbridge Library.