THE PARK – LOVE IN THE DARK
On the Deep Earth, Between the Stars
Under the protective shroud of nightfall in 1970s Tokyo, photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki stumbled upon an unlikely tryst of complex subjects caught in various acts of intimacy. Hidden beneath a blanket of darkness, lovers would meet to couple in what was categorized as public acts of indecency. Stealthily and only sometimes unobtrusively, an audience had begun to gather to watch the couples at a close distance. In photographic work that still remains jarring and poignant, The Park explores the deviant freedoms offered to those in the night, and the thinly-stretched line between participant and observer.
Inflexible to the liberal ideals of queer culture, premarital sex, and other intimate liberties, Japan in the ’70s was a place of little tolerance and rigid laws. It was not uncommon for individuals to continue to live with their parents long into adulthood, leaving no space for pleasurable acts within the safety of homes. Parks by nightfall became a safe haven for such meetups, providing a secretive reprieve for those wishing to partake in sexual acts, and for those wishing to watch. In many of the granulated images, newspapers or coats are laid out beneath the interlocked couples, and shoes or purses are perched neatly to the side. Although innately bizarre and unusual, there is a profound level of reason and logic in the human actions of the images.
Initially an observer of the observers, Yoshiyuki gradually infiltrated the ranks of the voyeurs, first by befriending and eventually by photographing. With a 35-millimeter camera and infrared film and flashbulbs, his work centered on heterosexual groups as well as the gay community. Gathering in throngs, men would seek out the sexual comfort of other men, left with little to no other place to go. British photographer Martin Parr writes in an excerpt, “[The Park is] a brilliant piece of social documentation, capturing perfectly the loneliness, sadness, and desperation that so often accompany sexual or human relationships in a big, hard metropolis like Tokyo.”
At times controversial, the work of The Park raises questions concerning the personal boundaries of those wishing to remain hidden. It also begs the question, where is the line drawn between voyeur and documenter? By photographing the acts that took place within the Japanese parks, the difference between the Peeping Tom, the photographer, and those viewing the images — now forty years later — has been irrevocably blurred. The Park, above all else, stirs movement within the viewer, invoking deeper inspections and queries, while also highlighting the deep-seated and intrinsic hunger for human contact.
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