Giada Ripa's best photograph captures Karen, a Japanese dominatrix and rope artist, with a tightly bound client. The image is part of The Yokohama Project, a series that explores Japan past and present.
A family discovery
Ten years ago, Ripa's father found a leather-bound album of 53 black and white photographs hidden in an attic in their family home in Piemonte, northern Italy. The images were portraits of Japanese 'native types', reflecting 19th-century colonial ways of representing people and cultures.
The album turned out to be a treasure: photographs by Felice Beato, the first foreign photographer to arrive in Japan in 1863, at the end of the Edo period and on the eve of the Meiji era. Beato accompanied British diplomatic and military delegations and later set up a portrait studio where he photographed geishas, fishers, samurai, teachers and government officials, creating a visual encyclopedia of Japanese life.
Tracing an ancestor
Ripa, who works with historical archives, was puzzled by how the album ended up in her house. A year later, she found a 19th-century manuscript written by her ancestor Mathilde Ruinart, an intellectual and painter. Ruinart had married the first Italian ambassador to Japan, sent there in 1867 to help secure Japanese silkworms, as a disease was devastating the European silk industry. She accompanied her husband on a four-month journey and stayed for four years.
Ripa read the diary and letters in one night. She found as many of Ruinart's descendants as possible and uncovered more of her archive, including her netsuke collection. Ripa photographed her objects and belongings, dedicating a year to her. She concluded that Ruinart and Beato, being the same age and in Japan at the same time, must have met, and that Ruinart selected and bought the photographs from him.
The Yokohama Project
From this came The Yokohama Project, a dialogue between Beato, Ruinart and Ripa across 150 years. In the first chapter, Ripa followed their footsteps, shooting on large-format film. For the second chapter, she photographed about 40 Japanese professions, some linked to Beato's subjects, such as geishas and shamisen players, but also contemporary ones. She invited people to a studio in Tokyo to present themselves as they wanted to be seen, photographing Lolita girls and a fishmonger who came with €1,000-worth of red snapper in a basket.
Karen and her practice
Karen, the subject of this portrait, describes herself as a BDSM dominatrix and rope artist. She practises shibari with cross-dressing, tying and binding, a broader term than bondage. It originates from the way samurai would bind their prisoners. Karen also practises kinbaku, a specific term for tight binding, used intimately with clients, mostly men with high social and professional pressures.
Her practice allows clients to step outside their daily identities and express a side they can't show elsewhere. 'She is a therapeutic person for them – they talk to her,' Ripa says. The man in the image is an assistant who worked on the project and agreed to be part of the picture. He had never experienced it before and admitted afterwards that he enjoyed it.
The Yokohama Project by Giada Ripa is published by Gost Books.
