The Yokohama Project

In the attic of a family home in Italy, Giada Ripa discovered an album of photographs of the city of Yokohama taken by Italian photographer Felice Beato, the first visual narrator of 1860s Japanese society. Ripa later discovered, while researching Beato and his images, a body of work created by her own relative, Mathilde Ruinart, a 19th-century artist, who traveled to Japan in 1867 with her diplomat husband providing a vivid visual description of it. In The Yokohama Project, Ripa has followed Beato and Ruinhart’s respective footsteps, and through a Western prism that bridges their 19th-century gaze and her own, attempts to identify local contemporary analogies and convey the transformations of society and landscape in Yokohama and its surroundings.