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.”