KOHEI YOSHIYUKI’s night-time photographs, taken with infrared film and flash in Japan’s Shinjuku, Yoyogi and Aoyama Parks during the 1970s, capture the hidden Tokyo; couples, clandestine trysts, onlookers hiding in bushes and peepers spying on lovers. A brilliant piece of social documentation, catching perfectly the loneliness, sadness and desperation that so often accompany sexual or human relationships in a big, hard metropolis like Tokyo.
These photographs are about sex but both participants and observers, appear fully clothed. The women, with their skirts and blouses hiked up, are more exposed, but even here the display of flesh is surprisingly discreet. YOSHIYUKI shows just enough to seduce the viewer. The work’s erotic charge is generated less by what we see than by what we imagine is going on. We may not be scrambling across the grass and peering through the bushes, but once we begin trying to untangle those limbs (Is that his arm or hers? Is she on top?), we’re no longer innocent observers. Leaning in for a closer look, we’ve joined the lurking voyeurs. - by VINCE ALETTI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohei_Yoshiyuki
