KOHEI YOSHIYUKI - DOCUMENT PARK - RARE FIRST EDITION Start Price USD 1,350.00 Current Price USD 1,350.00 Time Left 22 days 1 hours 26 minutes Bid Count 0 Buy It Now Price - Reserve Price - Start Time Saturday, November 01, 2008 End Time Friday, January 30, 2009 Location New York, NY See more about 'KOHEI YOSHIYUKI - DOCUMENT PARK - RARE FIRST EDITION' Description CHECK OUT MY STORE FOR MORE HARD TO FIND, RARE AND SIGNED PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS Book Description: Seven Sha, Tokyo, Japan, 1980. Soft cover. 1st Edition. Interview with the artist (in Japanese) by Nobuyoshi Araki. 112 pp., with 74 black-and-white, full-bleed gravure plates and additional reference illustrations. 10-1/8 x 8-3/8 inches.With dustcover but lacking the obi. 4to. Text in Japanese. Edgewear and creasing to the dustcover mainly to the top edge. Japanese photographic literature at its most interesting and obscure. A very difficult title to find. Quite scarce. Book Condition: Near fine with light foxing to the first and last few pages of the book in a Very Good Plus dust jacket with a 1" closed tear to top rear and adjacent crease (see photo). Cited in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, Volume II. (London and New York: Phaidon, 2006).] From Parr and Badger: "The abstract, somewhat inexplicit nature of [Document Kouen (Document Park)] raises few issues regarding the depiction of sex, but it does generate a whole slew of questions concerning voyeurism, privacy and stalking. It may indeed be considered a documentary book about sexual practices rather than a sex book in itself, although the voyeuristic nature of the images feeds back into both what is going on and how it was documented. To make the book, Yoshiyuki trawled the Shinjuku and Yoyogi parks in Tokyo, both notorious for nocturnal sexual activity, and photographed the 'goings-on' with infrared flash, which enabled him to get images in the dark without the flash being visible. One suspects that this was done less for reasons of concealment and more for the brittle, indeterminate aesthetic produced, for these seem to be semi-public events, with more voyeuristic spectators than people actually taking part in the various sexual activities The book is divided into three parts -- firstly heterosexual activities, followed by gay cruising and, finally, abstracted stills from the pornographic videos shown in 'love hotels'. As the book progresses everything gets less specific, until the final images are almost totally abstract, depicting the anonymity of such sexual encounters. Printed in rough gravure, and nominally a soft-core voyeur's manual, Document Kouen is somewhat short on titillation. It is, however, a brilliant piece of social documentation, catching perfectly the loneliness, sadness and desperation that so often accompany sexual or human relationships in a big.metropolis like Tokyo. CHECK OUT MY STORE FOR MORE HARD TO FIND, RARE AND SIGNED PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS Place a Bid!