CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/21/2019

In 'Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park,' an anticipation so acute it's almost deranged

Featured image is reproduced from The Park, Radius Books and Yossi Milo's beautiful new edition of the cult 1970s photobook by Kohei Yoshiyuki. A collection of "voyeuristic photographs of people having sex, and of voyeurs—peepers—watching people having sex, with infrared film," in the words of Noboyushi Araki, the photographs are truly shocking and mesmerizing. "Some of the more well-attended gatherings recall photographs of seances from the turn of the last century," Vince Aletti writes. "But instead of staring wide-eyed at a levitating body, table or chair floating in mid-air, the participants' attention is directed to something writhing on the ground. There's a similar current of excitement in the air—electric, sulphurous, a little frightening—and an anticipation so acute it's almost deranged. It's not the sex in Yoshiyuki's photographs that's shocking, it's the reckless, frantic fascination of the voyeurs—men so possessed that, for the moment, nothing else exists or matters—and the sense that we've all been there."