The grainy, slightly blown out, black and white images look and feel like they could be printed in a newspaper. They are sloppy, the horizon line dips and sways, and the composition is often hurried and cluttered — we imagine that Yoshiyuki had to snap the pictures quickly in order to escape undetected. And, though the content is certainly lurid, there is nothing sexy about the photographs. In fact, everyone is at least partially, if not fully clothed, and the most explicit sexual act is of one man felating another, shot from a much greater distance than the majority of the heterosexual rendezvous.

The majority of images range from innocuously perverse to disturbingly and surprisingly violent. In particular, the depiction of women is alarming: the frame usually decapitates the women, reducing them to a crotch, a pair of legs, and, if we are lucky, a breast or two. In all cases the male lover is decidedly the one in power, often with his hand aggressively thrust into the woman’s underwear and in one photograph the woman looks completely incapacitated, slumped and limp, as she is carried away by her supposed "lover." Other images reveal a scene that seems to verge on gang rape, where excited voyeurs have broken the sacrosanct barrier between participants and audience and are reaching in to cop a feel themselves.

What is interesting about these photographs is not that they show us anything that we are surprised to see in this day and age. In the intervening thirty years since Yoshiyuki shot this series, contemporary fine art photography has been deluged with images that make us aware of all the unusual, dark and strange places in which lovers make love. Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, and Ryan McGinley (to mention but a few) have shown us couples, threesomes and groups cavorting in the back seats of cars, on couches at crowded parties, in swimming pools, up in trees, in bathtubs, on subway cars, and on city streets. People love to do it in all kinds of ways, with all kinds of people, in all kinds of places.

What is valuable about seeing Yoshiyuki’s work — other than admiring them for their weird, spooky beauty and the insight they give us into this specific aspect of Japanese sexual culture — is that the photographs implicate us, the viewers, in their voyeurism. They question the pleasure we derive from viewing similar images that frequently line Chelsea gallery walls. By pairing images of intertwined young lovers in their floral beds, with images of the perverse men who watch them, Yoshiyuki holds up a mirror and forces us to ask: how different is the photographer or viewer from those men? Does filtering our acts of voyeurism through the camera really render the act art and not crime? Is distance in location and time to the act enough to distinguish a fine art connoisseur from a peeping tom? Go take a look, but be forewarned that your hands may not feel clean.