Untitled

In the early 1970s Yoshiyuki used infrared film and a filtered flashbulb to capture nighttime images of clandestine sexual encounters in Tokyo's Shinjuku, Yoyogi, and Aoyama Parks. At a time in Japan when premarital sex and homosexuality were frowned upon and most unmarried young people still lived with their parents, public parks at night offered a convenient if exposed haven for amorous young couples with nowhere else to go. The real subjects of Yoshiyuki's photographs, however, are not so much the couples themselves as the peeping Toms who would gather in nearby bushes to watch-and sometimes participate in-these trysts. When the series was first shown in 1979 at the Komai Gallery in Tokyo, the photographs were blown up to life size, the gallery lights were turned off, and each visitor was given a flashlight with which to peruse the photographs inch by inch.