Curated by: Helga Pakasaar

PLEASE BE ADVISED that this exhibition contains graphic material of sexual and provocative nature that is NOT suitable for young and sensitive viewers.

Kohei Yoshiyuki’s photographs taken at night around Tokyo from 1971 to 1979 capture sexual encounters between straight and gay partners, and the voyeurs who stalked them. The newly available infrared-sensitive film and filtered flashbulbs that Yoshiyuki used to disguise his presence result in ghostly, overexposed images. He was able to capture the absorption of his subjects in their illicit activities without disturbing them. Shot surreptitiously and blindly in the dark, these mysterious images are meditations on surveillance. These pictures implicate not only the photographer and his subjects, but also us – in the process of trying to decipher the murky scenes, we become spy's too.

Originally a commercial photographer, in the early 1970s Yoshiyuki became fascinated by the prevalence of outdoor sex in Japan, and the voyeuristic onlookers it attracted. The first results of his forays into the bushes of Shinjuku, Yoyogi and Aoyama parks were published as a photo essay in the magazine Weekly Shincho in 1972 and subsequently in several book versions of The Park series. Yoshiyuki’s photographs speak of the cultural anxieties provoked by the invasive presence of surveillance in contemporary life. The degraded and abstracted images of the Love Hotel series were taken from automatic videos in love hotels. The blurry ghosts of sexual contact are registered through a form of electronic voyeurism. Yoshiyuki’s photographs are almost illegible with graphic black and white contrasts, emphasizing how encounters between people and cameras are mediated.