| One night in the early 70s, young Japanese photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki and a fellow colleague took a walk through Chuo Park in Shinjuku, and encountered “something amazing”—a couple full on doing it. It was this incident that launched one of Yoshiyuki’s most controversial projects: a series of grainy black-and-white photographs called The Park. Made during the 70s in Tokyo’s Shinjuku, Yoyogi, and Aoyama parks, Yoshiyuki’s photographs document homo- and heterosexual activities and the voyeurs who shamelessly watched. | 
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Christine Hou on Kohei Yoshiyuki
Kohei Yoshiyuki, Untitled, 1973; gelatin silver print. Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery.One night in the early 70s, young Japanese photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki and a fellow colleague took a walk through Chuo Park in Shinjuku, and encountered “something amazing”—a couple full on doing it. It was this incident that launched one of Yoshiyuki’s most controversial projects: a series of grainy black-and-white photographs called The Park. Made during the 70s in Tokyo’s Shinjuku, Yoyogi, and Aoyama parks, Yoshiyuki’s photographs document homo- and heterosexual activities and the voyeurs who shamelessly watched. Using a 35mm camera, infrared film, and a filtered flash, the resulting works are rare scenes of uninhibited desire, lust, desperation, and loneliness, notions inevitably found in relationships in a city as reticent and overwhelming as Tokyo.
Before taking any pictures Yoshiyuki spent six months visiting the parks. “I just went there to become a friend of the voyeurs. To photograph the voyeurs, I needed to be considered one of them…” he writes in an e-mail through an interpreter to Philip Gefter.
According to Yoshiyuki, the voyeurs did not hold any reservations in their behavior—initially watching the couple from a distance then creeping closer, hiding in bushes and the couple’s blind spots—and at times reaching out to touch an exposed body part. In Yoshiyuki’s experience, couples were usually so engrossed in what they were doing that they were completely unfazed by the infrared flash and gawking spectators. However if four or five of them started to crowd around the couple—often lying down on the ground—they would be too scared to do anything about it, even if they were aware of those watching.Yoshiyuki’s photographs reveal more than the secret life of Tokyo’s sexual underground, they also evoke questions about the viewer’s own voyeuristic tendencies. After all, the viewer is merely another spectator subsumed by the spectacle of faceless bodies: men groping women, women spreading their legs, men going down on men…. Yoshiyuki writes: “My intention was to capture what happened in the parks, so I was not a real ‘voyeur’ like them. But I think in a way, the act of taking photographs itself is voyeuristic somehow. So I may be a voyeur because I’m a photographer.” However, Yoshiyuki’s photographs prompt the obvious question: Why are people fleeing to the parks to have sex? Is it because they have had sex everywhere else? Or is it because they have nowhere else to go in Tokyo’s oppressively dense metropolis? Yoshiyuki’s photographs suggests the latter; the lack of explicit gender and the anonymity of each subject gives a sort of sexy surveillance tape effect, as if their actions are strictly prohibited, deemed inappropriate by some higher cultural authority. With their faces usually turned away from the lens and further obscured by the film’s grain, the subjects are barely visible in the darkness, and silenced by the camera. “Most of them do it in missionary position. Or standing up. They do it in the rain…” Yoshiyuki said in a 1979 interview with photographer Araki Nobuyoshi. “Foreplay takes too long, I’ve overheard their conversations.”
