A dominatrix and her tightly bound client: Giada Ripa’s best photograph — SkimNews
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- Giada Ripa's father discovered a leather-bound album of 53 black-and-white photographs by Felice Beato in a family attic in Piemonte, northern Italy, hidden under piles of maps and other items
- Felice Beato arrived in Japan in 1863 as the first foreign photographer, setting up a portrait studio that produced a 'visual encyclopedia' of geishas, samurai, and officials at the close of the Edo period
- Ripa traced the album to her ancestor Mathilde Ruinart, who married Italy's first ambassador to Japan in 1867, traveling for four months and staying four years, keeping a diary and a netsuke collection
- Ruinart's previously unknown manuscript documented her riding her horse through foreigner-forbidden parts of Japan with a gun in her dress and reportedly shooting a group of bandits dead
- The Yokohama Project, published by Gost Books, frames a three-way dialogue between Beato, Ruinart, and Ripa across 150 years, with Ripa shooting on large-format in their footsteps
- For the project's second chapter, Ripa photographed about 40 Japanese professions in a Tokyo studio, including a fishmonger who arrived with €1,000 of red snapper and gave her only 10 minutes before the fish spoiled
- The featured subject Karen is a BDSM dominatrix and rope artist practicing shibari and kinbaku; she tied a project assistant who had never experienced it before and later said he enjoyed it
Why it matters: The book recovers a previously unknown female diarist of 1860s Japan — Ruinart — who literally rode alongside Beato's subjects and likely bought his photographs directly, reframing the standard Beato narrative as a three-person record rather than a single photographer's archive. For photography historians and curators, Gost Books now offers the first published cross-reference between Beato's images and a contemporary Italian eyewitness account.
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