The Park.

Photographs by Kohei Yoshiyuki. Text by Yossi Milo, Vince Aletti. Interview with the artist by Nobuyoshi Araki.

Radius Books/Yossi Milo, Santa Fe/New York, USA, 2019. English, 158 pp., 70 black-and-white illustrations, 11x12½".

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2019 by:

Jennifer Yoffy

This new, updated edition features an interview with the artist by Nobuyoshi Araki and an essay by Vince Aletti, contains all 60 works from the classic series, The Park, plus 8 previously unpublished images.

For his notorious Park photos, taken by night in Tokyo’s Shinjuku, Yoyogi, and Aoyama parks during the 1970s, Kohei Yoshiyuki used a 35mm camera, infrared film and flash to capture a secret community of lovers and voyeurs. His pictures document the people who gathered in these parks at night for clandestine trysts, as well as the many spectators lurking in the bushes who watched—and sometimes participated in—these couplings.

With their raw, snapshot-like quality, these images not only uncover the hidden sexual exploits of their subjects, both homosexual and heterosexual, they also serve as a chronicle of a Japan we rarely see. As Martin Parr writes in The Photobook: A History Volume II, 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.”

This newly designed, comprehensive edition of Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park brings this collectible classic back into print with eight never-before-seen images, as well as documentation of the Japanese zines that predated the original, sold-out 1980 Japanese edition (titled Document: Koen) and the 2007 Hatje Cantz/Yossi Milo edition.

ABOUT THE LIMITED EDITION

Limited Edition of 500 signed and numbered copies with a facsimile reproduction of the magazine Document: Koen, originally published by Seven-sha, Tokyo 1980 © Kohei Yoshiyuki.

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