Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park

from $150.00

Yoshiyuki’s cultishly popular work sits somewhere between Brassaï’s Parisians by night, Weegee’s infrared pictures of amorous moviegoers and Sophie Calle’s photographic explorations of surveillance. While seeming to cast a light on secret behavior, they reveal the yearning that exists in voyeurism, the melancholy in desire.

— Rebecca Bengal, T | The New York Times Style Magazine


Kohei Yoshiyuki’s The Park serves as a chronicle of a Japan we rarely see. Taken by night in Tokyo’s Shinjuku, Yoyogi, and Aoyama parks during the 1970s, the photographer used a 35mm camera, infrared film, and flash to capture a secret community of lovers and voyeurs of various ages and sexualities. His pictures document the people who gathered in these parks at night for clandestine trysts, as well as the many spectators lurking in the bushes who watched—and sometimes participated in—these couplings. With their raw, snapshot-like quality, these images not only uncover the hidden sexual exploits of their subjects, but also provoke questions about our own attitudes towards surveillance and voyeurism. This newly designed, comprehensive edition of Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park brings this collectible classic back into print and includes new images and documentary materials.

Lean more about the limited edition HERE

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Yoshiyuki’s cultishly popular work sits somewhere between Brassaï’s Parisians by night, Weegee’s infrared pictures of amorous moviegoers and Sophie Calle’s photographic explorations of surveillance. While seeming to cast a light on secret behavior, they reveal the yearning that exists in voyeurism, the melancholy in desire.

— Rebecca Bengal, T | The New York Times Style Magazine


Kohei Yoshiyuki’s The Park serves as a chronicle of a Japan we rarely see. Taken by night in Tokyo’s Shinjuku, Yoyogi, and Aoyama parks during the 1970s, the photographer used a 35mm camera, infrared film, and flash to capture a secret community of lovers and voyeurs of various ages and sexualities. His pictures document the people who gathered in these parks at night for clandestine trysts, as well as the many spectators lurking in the bushes who watched—and sometimes participated in—these couplings. With their raw, snapshot-like quality, these images not only uncover the hidden sexual exploits of their subjects, but also provoke questions about our own attitudes towards surveillance and voyeurism. This newly designed, comprehensive edition of Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park brings this collectible classic back into print and includes new images and documentary materials.

Lean more about the limited edition HERE

 

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Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park
 

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  • Photography by Kohei Yoshiyuki
    Introduction by Yossi Milo
    Text by Vince Aletti
    Interview with Nobuyoshi Araki

    Hardcover
    11 x 12.5 inches
    71 images / 160 pages (68 plates + 3 images of historic zines)
    ISBN: 9781942185482

    Co-published with Yossi Milo

    Trade $60 / Now RARE — $150

  • Kohei Yoshiyuki's (1946-2022; Japanese) daring photographs of Tokyo's subculture of voyeurs revealed an underbelly to the city's otherwise polished and reserved surface, and eventually established him as one of Japan's most important modern photographers. Yoshiyuki broke ground with his photographs taken in the early 1970s of couples engaged in sex acts in Tokyo's public parks, often accompanied by curious onlookers. His daring documentation of forbidden acts forced viewers to reckon with their own private lives and desires as well as the psychic unease felt collectively by the Japanese people following decades of loss and defeat for the country. It was not until 2007 that these photographs resurfaced in The Park, the artist's first U.S. show at Yossi Milo Gallery, revitalizing the artist's career and launching him onto an international stage. 

    Photographs from The Park are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. Works from the series have been exhibited around the world, including at the Tate Modern, London's exhibition Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera; the 5th Berlin Biennial and 7th Gwangju Biennale; the 2012 Liverpool Biennial and 9th Moscow Photo Biennale; and in the 55th Venice Biennale exhibition curated by Massimiliano Gioni.