‘Surveillance’ in the Park

With photography, one perversion can segue to another. In the 1970s, Kohei Yoshiyuki worked with a filtered Kodak flash and early infrared film to photograph couples during amorous trysts in the bushes and behind the trees of Tokyo parks.

In the early 1970s, Mr. Yoshiyuki was any ordinary commercial photographer in Tokyo when he and a colleague walked through Chuo Park in Shinjiku one night. Oddly enough, he noticed a couple on the ground, and then one man creeping towards them, followed by another.

“I had my camera, but it was dark,” he said in a 1979 interview for a Japanese publication. The era of photography then had no infrared flash units, but he found out after some research that Kodak had made infrared flashbulbs. Armed with his new equipment, Yoshiyuki returned to the park, together with two of his friends in Tokyo, for a period throughout the 70s.

For Yoshiyuki, however, photographing them did not come easy. To photograph the voyeurs, he had to be one of them. Six months before he came to shoot anything, he visited the parks regularly, befriended the voyeurs and shared their interests. Soon, they were speaking the same language.

“The voyeurs try to look at the people try to look at the couple from a distance in the beginning,” he says. “Then slowly approach toward the couple behind the bushes, and from the blind spots of the copuple they try to come as close as possible, and finally peep from a very close distance.” Sometimes, there are “voyeurs who try to touch the woman, and gradually escalating” before trouble would happen.

Yoshiyuki’s attempts to photograph them went unnoticed because the split-second flash from the infrared bulb was thought of as coming from passing cars, and near complete darkness enveloped both the voyeurs and couples.

Pushing the boundaries of privacy
Yoshiyuki’s photographs explore the boundaries of privacy, and do not incite desire as much as they document the act of lusting of the voyeurs. Ironically enough, while we may reluctantly accept being watched at the ATMs, shopping malls, or at the grocery store and the airports, our appetite for observing people in extremely personal circumstances does not seem to wane.

Susan Kismaric, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, agrees that Mr. Yoshiyuki’s work falls into a photographic tradition. “The impulse is the same,” she said. “To bring forth activity, especially of a sexual nature, that ‘we’ don’t normally see. It is one of the primary impulses in making photographs — to make visible what is normally invisible.”

The bold onlookers in much of Yoshiyuki’s photographs crowd around unnoticed, observing the couples. But even more bizzarely, some choose to participate in the action. The very presence of the voyeurs implicates both the photographer and even us, the viewer of these photographs.

Several of these photographs are slightly out of focused, and grainy not unlike surveillance images. Somehow, one feels that all these adds to the allure, giving it a grainy realism and allowing us to delight in the surreptitious and clandestine nature of these photographs behind the safety of our very computer screens, just as the voyeurs were safely behind the bushes at that time.