A dominatrix and her tightly bound client: Giada Ripa’s best photograph

Ten years ago, my dad called to say he had found these amazing images hidden under piles of maps and stuff in an attic in our family home in Piemonte, northern Italy. He had come across a leather-bound album of 53 black and white photographs: portraits of Japanese “native types”, reflecting the 19th-century colonial way of representing people, cultures and views of Japan.

It turned out we had a treasure in our hands: it was an album of photographs by Felice Beato, the first foreign photographer to arrive in Japan in 1863 at the end of the Edo period and on the eve of the Meiji era.

When Beato arrived, Japan was still largely closed to foreigners. He started accompanying British diplomatic and military delegations and later set up a portrait studio where he photographed geishas, fishers, samurai, teachers, government officials – creating a kind of visual encyclopedia of people, professions and ways of life. These were the first images of Japan that the western world saw.

I have always worked with historical archives. Finding this album was amazing, but I couldn’t understand why it had ended up in our house. I needed to know and decided to look for clues. A year later, I found a 19th-century manuscript written by one of our ancestors, Mathilde Ruinart, an intellectual and a painter. She had married the first Italian ambassador to Japan, who was sent there in 1867 partly to help secure Japanese silkworms, as a disease was devastating the European silk industry. She had accompanied her husband – the journey took four months – and they stayed for four years. The manuscript was her diary, as well as letters, detailing her time there.

I was so fascinated that I read it all in one night. While Beato is well known, no one had heard of this remarkable woman, who knew she was witnessing a major transition in Japan and wanted to leave a trace of her years there. She rode her horse through parts of the country forbidden to foreigners with a gun in her dress and reportedly once shot a group of bandits dead.

I found as many of Mathilde’s descendants as I could and uncovered more of her archive, including her netsuke collection, brought back from her time in Japan. I photographed her objects and belongings – I dedicated an entire year to her. She was the same age as Beato and in Japan at the same time, so it was obvious to me that they must have met there, and that she must have selected and bought the photographs from him, which is how they came to be in my house.

From that came The Yokohama Project, a dialogue between the three of us – Beato, Ruinart and me – across 150 years. Three ways of seeing Japan, past and present, trying to understand and build a bridge. In the first chapter of the project I followed their footsteps, going to places they went, shooting on large-format film, echoing the slow process of observation. For the second chapter, I photographed about 40 Japanese professions, some still linked to those photographed by Beato, such as the geisha and the shamisen player, but also going beyond them to contemporary Japan. I invited people to a studio in Tokyo to present themselves in the ways they wanted to be seen. I photographed Lolita girls, and a fishmonger who was like a movie star. In Tokyo fishmongers are superstars – he came with €1,000-worth of red snapper in a basket and told me we had 10 minutes or the fish would go bad, which is a problem shooting on large-format as it’s a very slow process.

Karen, who appears in this portrait, describes herself as a BDSM dominatrix and a rope artist. She practises shibari with cross-dressing, tying and binding – a broader term than bondage. It is a visual and technical practice of tying the body with rope that can be erotic or not. It originates from the way samurai would bind their prisoners. Karen also practises kinbaku, a specific term for tight binding. She uses it in an intimate way with her clients, who are mostly men with high social and professional pressures.

Her practice allows them to step outside their day to day identities and express a side they can’t show elsewhere. She is a therapeutic person for them, and they talk to her – it’s not just a physical relationship but a cathartic experience. It allows her clients to transcend daily life. The man in this image is actually an assistant who worked on the project with me and agreed to be part of the picture. The two of them talked, and she decided how to tie him. He had never experienced it before – and he admitted afterwards that he enjoyed it.

The Yokohama Project by Giada Ripa is published by Gost Books

Giada Ripa’s CV

Born: London, 1974
High point: My first museum solo exhibition, Displacement, at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art in 2011
Top tip: Follow what genuinely makes you curious. Research can give you the starting point, but it’s through looking, questioning and having a personal encounter with the subject that the work begins to come alive