My Bench

In its magazine appearance, the work was printed under the English title "MY BENCH / K. YAMAMOTO".^[2] The published version consists of twelve photographs spread over five pages.^[2] Camera Geijutsu also printed technical data for the series, listing a Rolleiflex camera with a 75 mm Planar lens, Neopan SS film, a five-second exposure, and a mixed D-72/D-76 developer.^[2]

Yamamoto's accompanying text opens by saying that he does not much like talking about works, and then stages the explanation as an exchange with a viewer.^[2] Across the text, recurring motifs such as a bench, a fallen star, a passing woman, and a "finale" give the sequence a narrative frame rather than presenting the images as isolated photographs.^[2]

Jelena Stojković situates Yamamoto's photo-narratives in the postwar period, writing that works such as It Is Raining In Town, My Room Is, Full of Fragments and My Thin-Aired Room (both 1956) used staged photographs to convey dream-like narrative, and noting Kōtarō Iizawa's argument that these sequences predated the better-known narrative works of the American photographer Duane Michals.^[4] Seen against that background, My Bench marks a later development of Yamamoto's postwar sequence-based practice: it was made in 1963 and first shown as a twelve-part photostory, several years before Michals began producing the narrative sequences for which he became known in the late 1960s.^[1][5]

The work has also been framed within a history of literary-photographic experiment. In History of Japanese Photography Magazines, 1874–1985, it appears in the section "Literature and photography", alongside works by Eikoh Hosoe, Hisae Imai, Nobuyoshi Araki, and Yutaka Takanashi.^[3]