Italian photographer Giada Ripa's ambitious project, The Yokohama Project, bridges generations and cultures by combining 1860s archive photography with modern portraits to explore Japan's transformation over a century and a half.
Ripa discovered an album of 53 hand-coloured photographs by Felice Beato, the first visual narrator of Japan, while rummaging through boxes in her family home in Italy. The images capture 1860s Japanese local society. A few months later, she found an unpublished manuscript by her relative Mathilde Ruinart, an artist and muse to intellectuals who lived in Japan at the same time and befriended Beato.
A Journey Retracing Historical Footsteps
Inspired by their work, Ripa embarked on a journey to retrace their footsteps, weaving their historic perspectives with her own style of photography. Armed with an analogue large-format camera, her works emulate the slow, deliberate and documentary gaze of her historical predecessors.
The project unfolds across two distinct chapters. The first is an archival and anthropological journey tracing the exact paths and viewpoints documented by Beato and Ruinart. The second is a series of striking studio portraits taken in Tokyo, where Ripa invited 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.
Beato's Legacy and Ruinart's Connection
Beato settled in Japan when it had just opened its doors to the western world, after a period during which the Shogun had forbidden access to foreigners except as part of diplomatic missions. For more than 50 years, until the early 20th 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.
Ripa's ancestor, Mathilde Ruinart, was a 19th-century artist and muse to several intellectuals, who travelled to Japan in 1867 with her diplomat husband. 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.
A Personal and Introspective Vision
Ripa acknowledges the historical distortions and simplifications often produced by the western gaze upon other cultures, and the complex entanglement between photography, anthropology and colonial histories. Her work unfolds as an introspective and personal journey.
She notes, "These images are not intended as a definitive portrait of a place, but rather as subjective impressions of a western traveller retracing the steps of an ancestor and a pioneering artist, navigating the fragile space between past and present, memory and interpretation." The Yokohama Project is available from GOST.
