Yoshiyuki Kohei

Por vezes há quem questione o potencial narrativo das imagens fotográficas em relação a outros meios, como o cinema, por exemplo. Esta série de imagens fazem parte de um trabalho intitulado "sex in the park" do fotógrafo Yoshiyuki Kohei. Creio que o potencial destas imagens reside precisamente naquilo que elas não revelam, pela sua estranheza ou pela ausência de uma legenda que nos explique o que se está a passar: onde estamos, a situação é real ou encenada, etc. Todas estas questões e dúvidas que a fotografia levanta são precisamente uma das suas características mais interessantes e que a tornam numa prática tão fascinante, ou seja, a capacidade de criar momentos em suspenso e incompletos.

Deixo em baixo a explicação do fotógrafo sobre este trabalho e desvendo assim o mistério. Fica também um link para um artigo no New York Times, com mais imagens desta série. Enjoy!

Mr. 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.

“Before taking those pictures, I visited the parks for about six months without shooting them,” Mr. Yoshiyuki wrote recently by e-mail, through an interpreter. “I just went there to become a friend of the voyeurs. To photograph the voyeurs, I needed to be considered one of them. I behaved like I had the same interest as the voyeurs, but I was equipped with a small camera. My intention was to capture what happened in the parks, so I was not a real ‘voyeur’ like them. But I think, in a way, the act of taking photographs itself is voyeuristic somehow. So I may be a voyeur, because I am a photographer.”

Mr. Yoshiyuki’s photographic activity was undetected because of the darkness; the flash of the infrared bulbs has been likened to the lights of a passing car.

“The couples were not aware of the voyeurs in most cases,” he wrote. “The voyeurs try to look at the couple from a distance in the beginning, then slowly approach toward the couple behind the bushes, and from the blind spots of the couple they try to come as close as possible, and finally peep from a very close distance. But sometimes there are the voyeurs who try to touch the woman, and gradually escalating — then trouble would happen.”

Guido Guidi

A propósito de um post no blog de Madelena Lello sobre fotografia italiana, deixo algumas imagens do fotógrafo Guido Guidi e um pequeno texto sobre o autor. Na edição deste ano da Photo London, tive a oportunidade de ver vintage prints deste autor e fiquei incrivelmente impressionado com a tonalidade das imagens, que de algum modo me fizeram lembrar as imagens do Luigi Ghirri, pois tratam-se de impressões analógicas em que as cores parecem estar ligeiramente esbatidas e com uma ligeira sobrexposição.

"Since the end of the sixties Guido Guidi photographs ‘still lifes’. First in Black and White and afterwards in colour. ‘Still lifes’ for Guidi are highways, bunkers, empty spaces, abandoned industrial nucleus and the landscape. He knows how to translate them from often ugly places into warm poetic beauty. The play with light and shadow and his perfect eye for detail, gives us a view into a constantly changing world, to which one would not have known it is existing.

The subject is not that important for the artist.
The way he photographs it remains the same.

‘One can perhaps describe photography as a free zone or as an area where the aesthetics hardly was coded and compromised.’
‘I am more interested in the sign of times as for the sign of history. I feel that it is difficult, to photograph space and impossible to photograph time. But the last subject could be a great challenge.’

(two quotes from the catalogue ‘‘Im Untergrund/Below Ground Leve/’, an interview from Nanni Baltzer with Guido Guidi. Exhibition in HAUS FÜR KUNST URI, Altdorf, Switzerland)".