Register Monday | October 7 | 2024

Peeping Toms

During the seventies, Kohei Yoshiyuki stalked Tokyo parks at night with a 35mm, infrared film and flash to take pictures of copulating couples and, sometimes, the "peepers" who watched them. The photographs were first shown in 1979, at Komai Gallery, Tokyo and have now been collected in a book called The Park.

"Before taking those pictures," says Kohei Yoshiyuki, "I visited the parks for about six months without shooting them. I behaved like I had the same interest as the voyeurs, but I was equipped with a small camera. My intention was to capture what happened in the parks, so I was not a real 'voyeur' like them. But I think, in a way, the act of taking photographs itself is voyeuristic somehow. So I may be a voyeur, because I am a photographer. The couples were not aware of the voyeurs in most cases."