Eiko Yamazawa majored in nihonga at the Shiritsu Joshi Bijutsu Gakkou [Private Women’s School of Fine Arts] in Tokyo and graduated in 1918. With the support of the members of the YWCA of Osaka, she moved to San Francisco in 1926 to study oil painting at the California School of Fine Arts. During her time there she learned photography as an assistant of the American photographer Consuelo Kanaga (1894-1978), whose idea of modern photography had a considerable impact on E. Yamazawa’s career.
She returned to Osaka in 1929 and opened her own studio in 1931,working as a portrait photographer. Although her business was quite successful, most of her work from this period was lost during the Second World War. The portrait of the celebrated actor Yasue Yamamoto (1902-1993) is among the few surviving original prints from the pre-war years. In 1950 she founded the Yamazawa Shashin Kenkyu Kai, a photography study group, to educate and nurture young women photographers, while reopening her studio and launching a new corporate photography business.

E. Yamazawa’s successful business did not leave her much time to make personal artwork, but her second visit to the United States, in 1955, at the invitation of her mentor C. Kanaga, became a turning point in her career. The purpose of her trip was to research commercial photography, which she had just begun building a business around, as well as to see The Family of Man [January 24 – May 8, 1955] exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which included works from C. Kanaga and her friends Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976), Edward Weston (1886–1958) and Ansel Adams (1902-1984). It is not hard to imagine that E. Yamazawa learned a lot from the works of the most eminent photographers of the time. After spending six months in New York, her work saw a gradual shift from realism to abstraction. The process of this stylistic change can be seen in her first photo book Far and Near, published in 1962 with Japanese and English captions she wrote herself.

In the 1960s E. Yamazawa closed her business and moved to Kobe. She dedicated herself to creating abstract photography and held several solo exhibitions titled What I Am Doing during the 1970s and 1980s. This series includes highly conceptual, self-reflective pieces wherein she photographed her photography supplies as well as her own work from the past. For example, the subject of What I Am Doing No. 8 (1980) is a crumpled page from her own photobook, What I Am Doing No. 1 (1976). The work is doubly self-referential because the subject of the original work was her photography supplies such as coloured glass filters and a light box. She established this unique style through ceaseless formal and technical experiments, which began in the mid-1950s.

E. Yamazawa passed away at the age of 96 at a nursing home in Wakayama Prefecture in 1995. In 1994 her first and last solo museum exhibition was held at the Itami City Museum of Art. At that time, however, many of her primary materials such as film negatives, original prints and correspondence were already lost, because E. Yamazawa had thrown them away. For the artist, the series of photobooks were her true artworks and everything else was insignificant. Although this contributed to her subsequently being forgotten, the artistic and historical significance of her work was re-evaluated thanks to the retrospective held at the Otani Memorial Art Museum, Nishinomiya City and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in 2019 and 2020. Today her work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka; and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum.