Kohei Yoshiyuki (吉行耕平, Yoshiyuki Kōhei, 1946 – 21 January 2022) was a Japanese photographer whose work included "Kōen" (公園, Park), photographs of people at night in sexual activities in parks in Tokyo.[1][2] Prints from The Park are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.[3][4][5][6][7] Examples from the series were included in the exhibition Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera at Tate Modern, SFMOMA and the Walker Art Center.[8]
He attracted much attention in 1979 with his exhibition "Kōen" (公園, Park) at the Komai Gallery, Tokyo. The black and white photographs were presented in a book published in 1980 that is "nominally a soft-core voyeur's manual",[9] with photographs of people at night in sexual activities in Shinjuku and Yoyogi parks (both in Tokyo), mostly with unknown spectators around them.[10] The photographs were taken with a 35 mm camera, infrared film and a flash with a special filter.[6][11][12][13] Gerry Badger and others have commented on how the photographs raise questions about the boundaries between spectator, voyeur and participant.
Yoshiyuki's work is held in the following permanent collections: