Photographer Discovers Forgotten 19th-Century Photos of Japan and Reimagines Them Today

A photographer uncovered a trove of forgotten 19th-century photographs of Japan in her family home and used them as inspiration for a series of modern portraits in a fascinating new book.

While rummaging through old boxes in her family home in Piedmont, Italy, photographer Giada Ripa discovered an album containing 53 hand-colored photographs by Felice Beato, one of the earliest visual chroniclers of Japan, documenting Japanese society in the 1860s.

Beato settled in Japan shortly after the country opened to the Western world. At the time, the shogun restricted access to foreigners, allowing them into the country largely as part of diplomatic missions. For more than 50 years, until the early 20th century, Beato’s hand-painted photographs of Japan were widely used in travel diaries, illustrated newspapers, and other published accounts, helping shape Western perceptions of Asian societies.

A few months later, Ripa discovered an unpublished manuscript by her distant ancestor Mathilde Ruinart, who had lived in Japan during the same period and befriended Beato. Ruinart was a 19th-century artist and muse to several intellectuals who traveled to Japan in 1867 with her diplomat husband to seek new varieties of silkworms for export to Italy. Ruinart’s writings from her time in Japan provide a detailed account of the country during their stay.

Inspired by the work of Beato and Ruinart, Ripa set out to retrace their footsteps, combining their historical perspectives with her own photographic approach. In Japan, she followed the paths taken by Beato and Ruinart and used an analog large-format camera to emulate the slow and deliberate documentary approach of her predecessors.

Ripa’s photo book The Yokohama Project (which will be published by GOST Books on September 28) brings these three perspectives together to examine how Japanese society and the country’s landscape have changed over roughly 150 years.

The Yokohama Project includes carefully reproduced spreads featuring rare rice-paper reproductions of Beato’s original photographs alongside Ripa’s images. The book is divided into two chapters. The first follows an archival and anthropological journey along the locations and viewpoints documented by Beato and Ruinart, examining what remains and what has changed over time.

The second chapter features studio portraits taken in Tokyo. Ripa photographed modern fishmongers, geishas, fashion designers, writers, wrestlers, priests, and artists, creating a contemporary counterpart to the Japanese people Beato photographed and categorized as “native types.”

Together, The Yokohama Project presents a 150-year visual dialogue about Japan through the work of three Western artists, connecting a long-forgotten photographic archive with contemporary life.

The Yokohama Project by Giada Ripa is available for pre-order on GOST Books.