Mr. Yoshiyuki was a young commercial photographer in Tokyo in the early 1970s when he and a colleague walked through Chuo Park in Shinjuku one night. He noticed a couple on the ground, and then one man creeping toward them, followed by another. “I had my camera, but it was dark,” he told the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki in a 1979 interview for a Japanese publication. Kohei Yoshiyuki’s Park series are taken between 1971-79 and documents sexual encounters in Tokyo’s Shinjuku, Yoyogi and Aoyama parks. Researching the technology in the era before infrared flash units, he found that Kodak made infrared flashbulbs. Mr. Yoshiyuki returned to the park, and to two others in Tokyo, through the ’70s. He photographed heterosexual and homosexual couples engaged in sexual activity and the peeping toms who stalked them. If the social phenomena captured in these photographs seem distinctly linked to Japanese culture, Mr. Yoshiyuki’s images of voyeurs reverberate well beyond it. Viewing his pictures means that you too are looking at activities not supposed to be seen by other people. We line up right behind the photographer, surreptitiously watching the peeping toms who are secretly watching the couples.
For that show the pictures were blown up to life size, the gallery lights were turned off, and each visitor was given a flashlight. Mr. Yoshiyuki wanted to reconstruct the darkness of the park. “I wanted people to look at the bodies an inch at a time,” he has said.
Karen Irvine, curator of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, said Mr. Yoshiyuki’s work is important because “it addresses photography’s unique capacity for observation and implication.” She locates his work in the tradition of artists who modified their cameras with decoy lenses and right-angle viewfinders to gain access to private moments. “Yoshiyuki’s photographs explore the boundaries of privacy, an increasingly rare commodity. Ironically, we may reluctantly accommodate ourselves to being watched at the A.T.M the airport, in stores, but our appetite for observing people in extremely personal circumstances doesn’t seem to wane.”
When viewing Yoshiyuki’s images of his Park series, I can’t help but hope that my images are even half as successful. The way that he takes these images with the subjects remaining unknowing is something that I am striding to succeed at. We are both worried about remaining anonymous for the mere success of our images. If he subjects had known he was there, it would have completely altered the way that they acted and his images would not have contained the same image. This is defiantly something that will impact my images as well.
Gallery:
http://www.yossimilogallery.com/artists/kohe_yosh/
Interview:
http://www.americansuburbx.com/2009/03/interview-nobuyoshi-araki-in.html
Website:
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