"For eighteen years, {Masaki Yamamoto's} family of seven coexisted in a one-room apartment in Kobe. His father drove trucks, and his mother worked as a cashier in a supermarket. They and their five children all slept in the same space, a room the size of six tatami mats, limbs overlapping amid a pile of ever-multiplying junk. When you looked up, you couldn’t avoid meeting the eyes of someone else, Yamamoto, the second-oldest of his siblings, said, adding, 'The one place you could be alone was the bathtub.' 'Guts,' his new photography book, is a celebration of his family’s everyday existence in these close quarters (via).

"The power of Yamamoto’s photos lies in this subversion of the viewer’s expectations. Yamamoto is clear-sighted and un-nostalgic about his family’s precarious economic circumstances. When he was eight years old, the family was evicted from their previous apartment in Kobe. They all lived out of a car for a month, and Yamamoto and his siblings spent time in a children’s home before being reunited with their parents. In one photo, Yamamoto shows his mother playing rock, paper, scissors with her husband, to decide whether their money should go to his pachinko games. The camera focusses on the bills clenched tightly in her fist" (via).