Visual Culture Blog

Kohei Yoshiyuki, The Park, 1971-1979

In the early 1970′s, while walking with a friend through a park in Tokyo, photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki noticed that young couples used the park as a space for intimate encounters in the belief that they are protected by the darkness of the night. Equipped with a small camera and Kodak’s infrared flashbulb, Yoshiyuki produced a series of photographs that captures the nightly performance in Tokyo’s parks. In this haunting series of photographs produced between 1971 and 1979 and simply called The Park, the couples, both straight and gay, become the unwitting actors in Yoshiyuki’s play. While The Park has attracted much controversy in 1979 when it was first exhibited and published as a book in Tokyo, it was nearly thirty years later, in 2007, that Yoshiyuki’s project received global acclaim resulting in exhibitions throughout the US and Europe.

Photographing the couples kissing, fondling and maybe doing more, Yoshiyuki, as it appears in the photographs, was not alone in observing the nocturnal encounters. So rather than only depicting the couples themselves, Yoshiyuki would literally take a step back and incorporate the bizarre dynamic between voyeurs and the subject of their gaze in his photographs. The voyeuristic act is completed by the viewer of the photograph observing the subject of the photograph. Yoshiyuki thus sets out a complex dynamic of looking and being-looked-at which can be deduced into this formula: a couple kisses in the park, the couple is watched by voyeurs, the photographer photographs the couples being watched by voyeurs, and finally, the viewer looks at a photograph depicting voyeurs looking at a couple kissing in the park. In other words, not only the photographer but also the viewer of the photograph become incidental voyeurs in the act of looking.

There are a number of historical and cultural explanations for Yoshiyuki’s set of photographs. Most images for The Park were taken in Tokyo’s Chuo Koen, or central park, adjacent to the bustling Shinjuku district. Throughout the late 1960s, Shinjuku was both, the hotbed for political activism and the New Left movement, and also, the emerging center for the sexual liberation in Japan. Shinjuku thus became, quite naturally, also a major center for photographers keen to capture the Zeitgeist of their generation. Shōmei Tōmatsu (b. 1930), Daidō Moriyama (b. 1938), even the illustrious Nobuyoshi Araki (b. 1940) all produced photographic work, often with hidden or overt sexual references, in around Shinjuku.

Daidō Moriyama, Zoku Nippon Gekijo Shashincho (Japan, a Photo Theater II), 1977

Apart from any political and ideological affinities Kohei Yoshiyuki (b. 1946) might have had with his contemporaries, there is also a geographical reason why young couples would be inclined to make out in the park and subsequently attract voyeurs and photographers alike. Shinjuku is a major transportation hub with several overland and underground train lines converging at Shinjuku station. For those couples that don’t live together and especially for those who are separated by a long commute, Shinjuku represents a logical common ground in which intimacies might be exchanged. Even today, despite the cultural taboo of kissing openly in public, young couples can be frequently seen making out at Shinjuku station. It is precisely this cultural predicament, that making out in public is frowned upon, combined by the logistics of living in a megapolis in which couples are separated by extreme distances, that brings the lovers to Tokyo’s parks. Yoshiyuki’s photographic also precedes the widespread popularity of the ‘Love Hotels’, or establishments charging for a short ‘stay’, which became increasingly popular in the 1980s seeking to cover an obvious gap in the market.

Shōhei Imamura, The Pornographers, 1966

In addition to the geographical specificities of dense urban living, Yoshiyuki’s The Park also evokes comparisons with cinematic trends in Japan at the time. Released in 1966, Shōhei Imamura’s iconoclastic film The Pornographers similarly deals with voyeurism and sexuality in Japanese culture. As film within a film, The Pornographers also seeks to reveal the very power (and limitations) of the cinematic apparatus itself. Like Yoshiyuki sneaking up to the voyeurs in Tokyo’s central park, Imamura depicts his subjects ostensibly in moments of looking. The central focus on the gaze in The Pornographers results in an extremely experimental and provocative form of visual communication. In one scene, the camera focuses on the main protagonist as he is watching a woman getting changed in her bedroom. In order to emulate the protagonist’s gaze sideways through the gap of a sliding door, the camera too is flipped on its side by 90 degrees. Like in Yoshiyuki’s nocturnal visits to the park, the viewer of the film becomes an unwitting accomplice while looking through the allegorical keyhole of the camera’s lens.

Scene from The Pornographers, 1966

Scenes from The Pornographers, 1966 and The Graduate, 1967

Because of its inventive camera techniques and angles, Shōhei Imamura’s The Pornographers would arguably also have an impact on American cinema. The classic scene in The Graduate (1967) in which Dustin Hoffman is depicted looking at Mrs. Robinson’s legs appears to be a close approximation of a similar scene in The Pornographers (1966). Yoshiyuki’s The Park too had a distinct effect on visual culture: in 2008, just a year after it was ‘re-discovered’, fashion photographer Steven Meisel’s series ‘Dogging’ unapologetically copies from Yoshiyuki’s acclaimed photographs.

Kohei Yoshiyuki The Park, 1971-79 and Steven Meisel Dogging, 2008

The appropriation and re-appropriation of images that deal with the desire of (secretly) looking is perhaps less an indication of the social conditions in which they were produced in than it is an indication for how easily and universally such looking can have sexual connotations. Those who knowingly look at those who are unknowingly being looked at also exert a form of dominance over their subject. In this complex power dynamic, the photograph (or the film) acts as an active conduit which lays bare the deep desires and fears of controlling and being controlled. Located in the middle of Tokyo yet surrounded by nature, photographed in complete darkness yet fully visible, as the voyeurs in Yoshiyuki’s photographs sneak up to, watch, and sometimes even grab towards those couples they are looking at, The Park represents the topographical equivalent of a split personality disorder in which these desires and fears appear to be magnified through the lens of the camera.

Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park is available as book. Other recommendations can be found in our online bookshop.

If you are interested in Japanese photography, please download my essay:
Marco Bohr (2011). ‘Are-Bure-Boke: Distortions in Late 1960s Japanese Cinema and Photography’. Dandelion Journal. Vol. 2, No. 2.

AP Photo/Sergey Ponomarev

It is a simple, yet a strikingly powerful image: a woman looks at family photographs found in the rubble of the devastating earthquake and tsunami. The photographs have been meticulously cleaned and left to dry on clothing pegs in a school gymnasium in the town of Natori, Miyagi prefecture. Survivors are given the opportunity to look at the photographs on display in the hope of identifying friends and family members. In some cases, the photograph will be the only thing that is left behind.

AP Photo/Sergey Ponomarev

Another photograph by the Russian press photographer Sergey Ponomarev depicts the sheer scale of the collection of photographs, and, by extension, the sheer scale of the disaster. A man is looking at an old family album, so enthralled in the images that he appears to be unaware of the very camera depicting him in the process of looking. In the background, several people can be seen doing exactly the same, sometimes in groups or as individual, trying to come to terms with the images laid out in front of them.

Ponomarev’s photographs are indicative of the complex and troubled relationship between photography and death. In his classic book Camera Lucida, the French semiotician Roland Barthes sought to overcome the death of his mother as he analyzes, over and over again, a photograph of her. In one of his most famous quotes, he writes ‘death is the eidos of photography’. In other words, photography operates on the idea that the photograph will, eventually, outlive the subject photographed. It is this tragic and perverse dichotomy between an inanimate and dead object (the photograph) and the sense of a person liveliness in a photograph – a liveliness particularly apparent in family photographs.

Anonymous, a butsudan in a traditional Japanese household

Apart from referring to an universally applicable attribute of photography, the hope to find photographs from deceased friends and family members in the school gymnasium of Natori also displays a culturally specific phenomenon. Similar to other Asian cultures such as China and Korea, funerals are usually accompanied by a formal portrait with black rope on the top corners of the image. These photographs of the deceased constitute a crucial aspect in the process of mourning: they are later displayed on or above small Bhuddist shrines (butsudan) kept in most traditional Japanese households. In the school gymnasium of Natori, the survivors’ search for a photograph of family and friends is partially motivated by a spiritual process that subscribes great value to the photographic likeliness of a person.

AP Photo/Vincent Yu

In contrast to the sterile and composed black and white portraits associated with the funeral procession and the butsudan, the photographs on display in the school gymnasium represent moments of vivacity and liveliness – moments traditionally perceived as worthy of photographic representation. An image by Hong Kong born photographer Vincent Yu can be read as a collage representing significant life stages: amongst several photographs of new-born babies, there are photographs of weddings, sports days, school groups and holidays. In sum, they are the kind of photographs that represent a lived experience, that situate the subject within a community, that communicate what it means to be human.

As the family photographs in the school gymnasium continue to dry on clothing pegs, those who survived are coming to terms with the discrepancy between the tragic loss of human life and the happiness encountered in the image. The press photographs depicting family photographs are thus deeply self-referential: they are photographs about the very materiality of photography, the collective memories produced by photographs and the photograph, perhaps, constituting a source of comfort.

If you are interested in Japanese photography, please download my essay:
Marco Bohr (2011). ‘Are-Bure-Boke: Distortions in Late 1960s Japanese Cinema and Photography’. Dandelion Journal. Vol. 2, No. 2.

Shortly after the devastating earthquake and ensuing Tsunami hit the north-eastern coast of Japan, the Japanese Prime Minister Kaoto Kan addressed the assembled press in Tokyo with a brief statement expressing his sympathies to those affected by the disaster. In his short statement, Kan alludes to a deeply harbored anxiety in Japanese culture as he says the following:

“Some of the nuclear power plants in the region have automatically shut down, but there is no leakage of radioactive materials to the environment.”

This message might come to haunt Kan as conflicting news is already emerging from a nuclear power plant in Fukushima. Perhaps to avoid a panic, Kan seeks to quell the anxiety of a nuclear disaster that operates very powerfully in the only country on Earth to have suffered the explosion of an atomic bomb. Ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fears caused by this nuclear trauma are an important part of Japanese visual culture.

Akira Kurosawa, Dreams, 1990

Fictional representations of a nuclear apocalypse – now eerily reminiscent of the actual news footage emerging from the disaster zone – are a constant theme in Japanese cinema and anime. The eminent director Akira Kurosawa for instance, in his portrayal of a bizarre collection of dreamscapes, depicts Mount Fuji (an ideological symbol for the nation) surrounded by explosions and steeped in the colour red. The protagonist in Dreams (1990) wonders if there was an earthquake. No, far worse he is told, Japan was struck by a nuclear disaster.

Tokyo after ‘Third Impact’ in Neon Genesis Evangelion, 1995

Kurosawa’s post-apocalyptic vision is similarly evoked in the classic anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion by the director Hideaki Anno. The young boy protagonist ventures through a deserted Tokyo struck by a massive disaster referred to in the series as ‘Third Impact’. If the Kanto earthquake from 1923 represents the first impact, and the Allied firebombs in 1944/45 represent the second impact, the ‘Third Impact’ in Neon Genesis Evangelion refers to an event that is yet to come. First screened in 1995, Neon Genesis Evangelion stirred a deeply felt anxiety amongst Japan’s youth that the world would come to an end in the year 2000. This was partially related to the global fears of the Y2K computer virus and the popularity of Nostradamus’s predictions amongst followers of new religions.

Neon Genesis Evengelion, Episode 1, 1995

However, rather then seeking a reductive explanation for a complex set of causalities, I believe that post-apocalyptic visions in Japanese visual culture are the state’s equivalent to a psychoanalytical condition: post-traumatic stress syndrome. The disasters and ‘Third impacts’ in fictional Japanese visual culture can never be entirely disassociated with the actual experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The most famous example for the relationship between nuclear fears and Japanese visual culture remains to be the iconic Godzilla movie. First screened in 1954, in the film Godzilla was created following a nuclear detonations and acts as a powerful metaphor for nuclear weapons. Godzilla must be considered in the aftermath of Hiroshima, but also, the continued testing of nuclear weapons on the Bikini atoll from 1946 to 1958 by the Americans. In other words, Godzilla is the fictional manifestation of global arms race that was yet to peak at the height of the cold war.

Godzilla, 1954

There is no question, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan are a natural disaster. Yet the possibility of a nuclear meltdown or atomic ground zero is created by man. It is this dichotomy between man and nature that the Prime Minister of Japan maybe inadvertently evoked in his speech to the press. Man cannot control nature, but neither should an ever growing risk of a nuclear disaster control man. If the many references of a nuclear apocalypse in Japanese visual culture are anything to go by, the deeply embedded anxieties of a people should have been taken more seriously.

If you are interested in Japanese photography, please download my essay:
Marco Bohr (2011). ‘Are-Bure-Boke: Distortions in Late 1960s Japanese Cinema and Photography’. Dandelion Journal. Vol. 2, No. 2.