The Park by Kohei Yoshiyuki
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Publisher: Radius Books/Yossi Milo
Year: 2019
Format: Hardcover
Edition: First Edition
Condition: New
For his notorious Park photos, taken at night in Tokyo’s Shinjuku, Yoyogi and Aoyama parks during the 1970s, Kohei Yoshiyuki used a 35mm camera, infrared film and flash to capture a secret community of lovers and voyeurs. 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, both same-sex and heterosexual, but they also serve as a chronicle of a Japan we rarely see. As Martin Parr writes in The Photobook: A History, Volume II, The Park is “a brilliant piece of social documentation, capturing perfectly the loneliness, sadness and desperation that so often accompany sexual or human relationships in a big, hard metropolis like Tokyo.”
Accompanied by an introduction by Yossi Milo, a short essay by Vince Aletti
and an interview between the photographer and Nobuyoshi Araki.