At night in 1970s Tokyo, Kohei Yoshiyuki carried a 35mm camera, infrared film and a flash into Shinjuku, Yoyogi and Aoyama parks. Couples met there for clandestine encounters; watchers gathered in the bushes around them. Some kept to looking. Others drew closer and joined in. The pictures hold lovers and spectators, same-sex and heterosexual, in the same furtive conditions, their raw, snapshot-like quality sharpened by the infrared method and its abrupt light.

Anyone making such pictures is also caught in the act of looking they describe. Martin Parr, writing in The Photobook: A History, Volume II, judged the series a brilliant piece of social documentation that captures the loneliness, sadness and desperation accompanying sexual and human relationships in a hard metropolis. The publisher places the work between Brassaï’s night Parisians, Weegee’s infrared moviegoers and Sophie Calle’s photographic explorations of surveillance: participant and observer, the one who watches and the one who is watched. That double position runs through the book.

This newly designed edition, co-published with Yossi Milo, returns the series to print with eight never-before-seen images and documentation of the Japanese zines that preceded the 2007 edition. An introduction by Yossi Milo, text by Vince Aletti and an interview with Nobuyoshi Araki accompany the plates, so the volume reads as series and archive at once. The added material gives the book a place among versions of The Park distinct from the 2007 edition it follows.

Yoshiyuki first came to prominence when the Park photographs debuted at Komei Gallery, Tokyo, in 1979. For a collection alert to photography’s uneasy relation to its subjects, or to how a body of work moves from magazine pages into book form, this edition’s new images and zine documentation are the substance of the case. It is a book about vision and complicity in which the viewer’s own position remains part of the subject.