Using a 35mm camera, infrared film, and a flash, Kohei Yoshiyuki documented the people who gathered in several Tokyo parks at night for "clandestine trysts, as well as the many spectators lurking in the bushes who watched—and sometimes participated in—these couplings." To celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the series, Yossi Milo Gallery and Radius Books are releasing a newly designed book that will include eight images from a never before seen body of work, Remote Islands, depicting amorous young couples on the volcanic islands of Nii-jima and Shikine-jima. The book will also feature writings by Vince Aletti and Nobuyoshi Araki.
Reflecting on the series in his book The Photobook: A History, Volume II, photographer Martin Parr writes that "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.”
From the introduction of the new book:
“’The Park’ is a unique and inimitable contribution to the annals of Japanese postwar photography, capturing that brief, weird liminal period of the country’s history, its awkward adolescence between the bleak sixties, a decade of loss and defeat, and the eighties, when Japan once again seemed on the verge of ruling the world. Yoshiyuki reveals a hidden city at night where, inside the folds of darkness, couples and groups are released from life’s constraints. Clandestine gatherings, onlookers hiding in the bushes, lovers, and those urged to participate are all caught in flagrante by his camera. To look at these photographs is to intrude upon someone else’s secret.”
For more information, visit Radius Books.
