Take a stroll between Japan’s past and present – in pictures
Ryo Nagata Yamato Transport Co Ltd, employee
The Yokohama Project by Italian photographer Giada Ripa is a beautifully crafted body of work that bridges generations, cultures and media to explore the profound transformation of Japanese society and landscape over a century and a half through the uncovering of a photographic archive miles from its origin. The Yokohama Project by Giada Ripa is available from GOST
Felice Beato, Out for a Walk, 1868
While rummaging through boxes in her family home in Italy, Ripa found an album of 53 hand-coloured photographs by the first visual narrator of Japan, Felice Beato, capturing 1860s Japanese local society. A few months later, she found an unpublished manuscript by her old relative and muse to many intellectuals, Mathilde Ruinart, who lived in Japan at the same time and befriended Beato.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 style of photography
Michiru Okajima, Yuki Kimura, Lolita Fashion
Stepping into the footsteps of both Beato and Ruinart and armed with an analogue large-format camera, the works emulate the slow, deliberate and documentary gaze of Ripa’s historical predecessors
Felice Beato, Bettoes or Grooms, 1868
It’s believed that the custom of tattooing originated with fishermen, who imagined that by tattooing their bodies with dragons and other figures, they would frighten away sharks or sea monsters likely to do them harm
Mayume Watanuma, tattoo artist and painter
Ripa: ‘In my role as photographer, 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’
Vivienne Sato, artist, writer, critic, drag queen
The work 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. 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
Felice Beato, fishmonger, 1868
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
Toshio Awatake, Tsukiji market fishmonger
In parallel, 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
Suzume Geisha
Ripa: ‘I’m very aware of the historical distortions and simplifications often produced by the western gaze upon other cultures and of the complex entanglement between photography, anthropology and colonial histories, and this work unfolds as an introspective and personal journey’
Karen Hinata, dominatrix
Read more about this image in our My Best Shot feature
Felice Beato, Japanese Yakonin in ceremonial dress, 1868
His dress is said to have first been introduced during the reign of Ashikaga Takauji, nearly 500 years earlier. It is worn at the New Year and other holidays, by the samurai or two-sworded class, and also at weddings, feasts and funerals. As far back as 600 years ago some samurai wore four swords when fighting; one at the back, two on the left side, and one on the right side. These were laid aside in peacetime
Kazufusa Hosho, 20th generation head of Hōshō School, Noh actor
The Hōshō School is one of the five major traditional schools of shite (protagonist) actors in Japanese Noh theatre
Shoushi Doi, Bunka Fashion College Student
Ripa: ‘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’KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.