RIP Kohei Yoshiyuki (吉行耕平, Yoshiyuki Kōhei, 1946 – 29 January 2022).
Kohei Yoshiyuki was a Japanese photographer who attracted much attention in 1979 with his exhibition “Kōen” (公園, Park) at the Komai Gallery, Tokyo. The black-and-white photographs were presented in a book published in 1980 that is “nominally a soft-core voyeur’s manual”, with photographs of people in sexual activities in Shinjuku and Yoyogi parks (both in Tokyo), mostly with unknown spectators around them. The photographs were taken with a 35mm camera and infrared flashbulbs. Gerry Badger and others have commented on how the photographs raise questions about the boundaries between spectator, voyeur and participant.
Yoshiyuki’s works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), and North Carolina Museum of Art (Raleigh).
Examples of Yoshiyuki’s series The Park were included in the exhibition Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera which was on view at Tate Modern from 28 May to 3 October 2010.
