The Park

Working at night in three Tokyo parks during the 1970s, Kohei Yoshiyuki used infrared film and flash to photograph couples in the midst of sexual encounters, both heterosexual and homosexual, that took place under cover of darkness in public space. His camera also caught something else: the onlookers, sometimes dozens of them, who crouched in the bushes and shadows to watch, and occasionally to intervene. The resulting duotone images collapse the line between voyeur, participant, and photographer, since Yoshiyuki himself worked from among the same crowd of spectators. First published in Japan in 1980 under the title Koen (Park), the work remained largely unknown outside Japan until Yossi Milo Gallery exhibited it in New York in 2007, prompting this first English-language edition, co-published by Hatje Cantz and the gallery. The book pairs the photographs with text by critic Vince Aletti and an interview between Yoshiyuki and photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, situating the work within debates about voyeurism, consent, and surveillance in postwar Japanese photography.