- Statement -
Yamamoto documented the last two years of her grandmother’s life, who lived in a small town by the sea in Chiba Prefecture before she passed away in 2019 at the age of 91. The portraits show her grandmother wearing clothes by designer Yoshikazu Yamagata (WRITTENAFTERWARDS), a friend of Yamamoto’s. The photographs were taken at her grandmother’s house, where she continued to live alone after her husband’s death, at the nursing home, at the hospital, and again at her home after her passing. Although her grandmother was a conservative woman, she always enjoyed wearing these avant-garde clothes as a model. Even as her health was gradually deteriorating, Yamamoto felt her grandmother’s vitality as she applied her own lipstick and acted like an actress in the spotlight during photo shoots. Oddly enough, this vitality seemed to coincide with the rebirth of nature in the seaside town, where her grandparents had lived, and which Yamamoto had begun photographing after it had been destroyed by the tsunami of the Great East Japan Earthquake. Yamamoto says that through her photographs, she is discovering the life that continues to secretly revolve within things that were thought to be broken.