Document Koen/Document Park by Kohei Yoshiyuki, First Edition

This is a first edition, first printing of Kohei Yoshiyuki’s critically acclaimed “Document Koen/Document Park” published by Seven Sha, Tokyo, Japan in 1980. Yoshiyuki was a young commercial photographer in Tokyo in the early 1970s when he and a colleague walked through Chuo Park in Shinjuku one night. He noticed a couple on the ground, and then one man creeping toward them, followed by another. “I had my camera, but it was dark,” he told the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki in a 1979 interview for a Japanese publication. Researching the technology in the era before infrared flash units, he found that Kodak made infrared flashbulbs. Mr. Yoshiyuki returned to the park, and to two others in Tokyo, through the ’70s. He photographed heterosexual and homosexual couples engaged in sexual activity and the peeping toms who stalked them.

Martin Parr & Gerry Badger in their book, “The Photobook: A History” state, “Document Park is a brilliant piece of social documentation, catching perfectly the loneliness, sadness and desperation that so often accompany sexual or human relationships in a big, hard metropolis like Tokyo.”Karen Irvine, curator of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, said Mr. Yoshiyuki’s work is important because “it addresses photography’s unique capacity for observation and implication.” She locates his work in the tradition of artists who modified their cameras with decoy lenses and right-angle viewfinders to gain access to private moments. Weegee, for example, rigged his camera to capture couples kissing in darkened New York movie theaters. Walker Evans covertly photographed fellow passengers on New York subways. “Like the work of these artists,” Ms. Irvine said, “Yoshiyuki’s photographs explore the boundaries of privacy, an increasingly rare commodity. Ironically, we may reluctantly accommodate ourselves to being watched at the A.T.M., the airport, in stores, but our appetite for observing people in extremely personal circumstances doesn’t seem to wane.”

Measuring approximately 11” x 8”, the book is bound in photographically illustrated wraps with a thin glassine dust jacket. Both the book and dust jacket are in FINE condition. This is a great opportunity to own highly sought photobook title that is rarely available in this condition.

Photographs of the book in the glassine as well as several photographs contained in the book appear in the photo section of the listing. Please note the first image is a stock image of the cover because we did not want to remove the original glassine jacket.