Kohei Yoshiyuki

While working as a commercial photographer in Tokyo, Kohei Yoshiyuki took a nighttime stroll through a public park, stumbling across what would become the subject of the strange, disturbing series for which he is famous: couples having sex and the moth-like voyeurs who watch them. Titled “The Park” (1970s), this series of black-and-white photographs was shot with a handheld camera and infrared film. Raw and grainy, the photographs capture the voyeurs from behind, as they surreptitiously approach the couples. The voyeurs-eye view implicates Yoshiyuki, viewers of his work, and photography itself in this violation of privacy. “My intention was to capture what happened in the parks, so I was not a real ‘voyeur’,” he explains. “But I think…the act of taking photographs itself is voyeuristic somehow. So I may be a voyeur, because I am a photographer.”