Variation of "Buddhist Temple's Bird Cage"

Before the war, Nagoya had become a experimental field for the arts, attracting movements such as new poetry which raised the awareness of modernism in the 1920's and the following surrealism movement. It is said that the poet Kansuke Yamamoto decided his own direction through encounters with Chiruu Yamanaka who was a poet and critic living in Nagoya and introducing overseas surrealistic trends to Japan and with Katsue Kitazono who was the leader of an avant-garde poet group, "VOU", as well as through the itinerant "Overseas Surrealism" exhibition which was held in Nagoya in 1937. Yamamoto first issued a surrealistic poem magazine "Yoru-no Funsui" together with Chiruu Yamanaka in Nagoya in 1938, and there he published his own poems and photographs The following year, in 1939, he established the "Avant-garde" together with Minoru Sakata and Yoshio Shimozato, and began to seriously pursue his photography.
Yamamoto, unlike other photographers in Nagoya who chose natural subjects as their photographic themes, chose subjects much closer to our daily life, such as a telephone, a hat, and a bed sheet, creating images with a sense of poetic feeling. In this photograph, only a telephone receiver is located outside of a bird cage. Using a typical rhetorical method of surrealism, he expressed silent resistance to the dark suppression of speech and writing at that time by symbolizing the nonexistence of voices.