While rummaging through old boxes in her family home in Piedmont, Italy, Giada Ripa discovered an album of 53 hand-coloured photographs by the first visual narrator of Japan, Felice Beato, capturing 1860s Japanese local society. In parallel and a few months later, she found an unpublished manuscript by an old relative and muse to many intellectuals, Mathilde Ruinart, who lived in Japan at the same time and befriended Beato. Inspired by their work, Ripa embarked on a journey to retrace their footsteps, weaving their historic perspectives with her own unique style of photography.
The Yokohama Project 1867–2017 features meticulously reproduced spreads, including rare rice-paper reproductions of Beato’s original works alongside Ripa's imagery. The book also unfolds across two distinct, evocative chapters: the first is an archival and anthropological journey tracing the exact paths and viewpoints documented by Beato and Ruinart, capturing what remains and what has been irrevocably altered by time. The second is a series of striking studio portraits taken in Tokyo where Ripa invited modern fishmongers, geishas, fashion designers, writers, wrestlers, priests, and artists to sit before her lens, constructing a vibrant, living dialogue with the historic ‘native types famously catalogued by Beato.
Stepping into the footsteps of both Beato and Ruinart and armed with an analogue large-format camera, the works produced emulate the slow, deliberate, and documentary gaze of her historical predecessors.
Beato settled in Japan when it had just opened its doors to the Western world, in a period during which the Shogun had forbidden access to foreigners except as part of diplomatic missions. For over fifty years, until the early twentieth century, Beato’s photographs of Asia constituted the standard imagery used in travel diaries, illustrated newspapers, and other published accounts, thus helping shape the ‘western’ notion of Asian society. In parallel, Ripa’s ancestor, Mathilde Ruinart, was a 19th-century artist and muse to several intellectuals, who traveled to Japan in 1867 with her diplomat husband providing a vivid description of it. They were in Japan mainly to seek new silkworm varieties to export to Italy, at a time when a devastating disease was ravaging Europe’s silk industry.
From Mathilde Ruinart’s ‘Carnets de Voyage’(drawings describing her trip in Japan) and ‘Voyage au Japon’ emerges the friendship with Felice Beato, explaining how the album ended up in the house. In my role as photographer, and with both an archival and anthropological approach, I acted as the link between Beato’s images and the figure of Mathilde, following their respective footsteps and attempting, through a western prism that bridges her 19th-century gaze and my own, to identify local contemporary analogies and convey the transformations of society and landscape in Yokohama and its surroundings.
