KOHEI YOSHIYUKI

Posted on 2012-08-27

First exhibited in Tokyo in 1979, Kohei Yoshiyuki’s (Japan, b. 1946) twin projects The Park and Love Hotel ignited furious debate about photography’s relationship with voyeurism and surveillance.

Yoshiyuki was a young commercial photographer in Tokyo in the early 1970s when he and a colleague walked through Chuo Park in Shinjuku one night. They noticed a couple on the ground, then spectators lurking in the bushes. Fascinated by these illicit games of cat and mouse, Yoshiyuki spent the next six months becoming a participant. “To photograph the voyeurs”, he later wrote, “I needed to be considered one of them”. Returning with his camera, loaded with infrared flashbulbs and film, he photographed in three different Tokyo parks over several years.

Exhibition runs from September 15th to November 25th, 2012

Open Eye Gallery
19 Mann Island
Liverpool Waterfront
Liverpool
L3 1BP

www.openeye.org.uk