Kohei Yoshiyuki, the Voyeur of Tokyo’s Voyeurs

Writing in The Photobook: A History Vol. 2 (2006) Phaidon, photographer Martin Parr hails Kohei Yoshiyuki’s 1979 The Park as ‘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.’ The original publication was accompanied by an exhibition at the Komai Gallery in Tokyo, while in 2019 a new edition of The Park was published by Radius Books and the gallery Yossi Milo. It includes an interview with Kohei Yoshiyuki by Nobuyoshi Araki and eight never-seen-before images. 

Kohei Yoshiyuki – a pseudonym, his real name obscured from public knowledge – was born in 1946 in Hiroshima Prefecture, and his work is part of the most important institutional collections in the world.

Voyeurism as a necessary component of the act of photography

According to Sergio Benvenuto in What are Perversions? Sexuality, Ethics, Psychoanalysis, Kohei Yoshiyuki became famous for being the voyeur of voyeurs. In the 1970s, while researching what to work on, Kohei Yoshiyuki would go walking at night in the parks of Shinjuki, Yoyogi, and Aoyama in Tokyo. With his 35-mm camera, infrared film, and flash, he would observe couples and groups from both straight and gay communities, and the curious onlookers that surrounded them. The artist, who considers voyeurism to be a part of the photographic act, claims he is more exalted than excited by these environments. 

Four decades after its initial publication, this work and its themes are still immediately associated with the work of Kohei Yoshiyuki. While he is best known for The Park, his 1978 series Love Hotel introduces the spectator to the hotels to which sex workers bring their clients through grainy photographs taken with a hidden camera.

The Park (2019), a photobook by Kohei Yoshiyuki is republished by Radius books.