Giada Ripa's The Yokohama Project Unites Felice Beato, Mathilde Ruinart, and Contemporary Japan

Key facts

• Giada Ripa's The Yokohama Project is published by Gost Books.
• The project began when Ripa's father found a leather-bound album of 53 black-and-white photographs by Felice Beato in an attic in Piemonte, northern Italy, ten years ago.
• Felice Beato was the first foreign photographer to arrive in Japan in 1863, at the end of the Edo period.
• Ripa discovered a 19th-century manuscript by her ancestor Mathilde Ruinart, who married the first Italian ambassador to Japan in 1867 and stayed for four years.
• Ripa photographed about 40 contemporary Japanese professions for the project's second chapter, including a fishmonger who brought €1,000 worth of red snapper.
• The portrait features Karen, a Japanese dominatrix and rope artist who practices shibari and kinbaku.
• Karen's clients are mostly men with high social and professional pressures.
• The man in the photograph is Ripa's assistant, who had never experienced shibari before and enjoyed it.