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.

Born in London and raised in Brussels, Giada Ripa graduated from Milan University with an M.A. in Political Science/ International Relations. Based between New York and Milan, she started her career in 2000 after studying at the International Center of Photography in NY working both as an artist and a correspondent photographer for various international magazines 

Her work has been widely and internationally exhibited including; Triennale Museum in Milan, Paris Photo, Musee’ Botanique in Brussel, Royal College of Art in London, International Centre of Photography and PS122 in New York; Art-Hub in Shanghai and Beijing, Palazzo delle Esposizione in Rome, Photo Biennale in Lucca, Arsenale in Venice, Seoul and Incheon in Korea, Art Brussels, Palazzo Litta in Milan, Kyotographie in Kyoto and Paris Photo and Paris Biennale 

Her first museum solo show was held in 2011 at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. The Thin Line was also shown at the Milan Film Festival in 2021. She was a visiting lecturer at the ICP in New York, at the Art Academy in Shanghai, at The Rodchenko Moscow School of photography and has been teaching, between 2005 and 2011, on the MA program of Domus Academy in Milan. 

 Among her publications: In 2006, a book released by the International Museum of Women of San Francisco; Imagining Ourselves: Voices of a new generation of Women, and presented at the UN in New York; Falling Icons in 2009; The Invisible Pipeline a commissioned book in 2011 exploring a hidden and eco -friendly pipeline along the Amazon forest in Ecuador and Displacement; Beyond the Oil Route in 2012, the first photography book to be published by Moleskine and in 2021 The Thin Line published by 5 continents. 

Ripa was shortlisted in the Terna 02 Award in 2009. She was twice nominated for the prestigious international award on sustainability Prix Pictet in 2012 and in 2018 with The Thin Line and was shortlisted in 2015 for the Vevey International Photo Award with her on-going project The Yokohama Project 1867-2017.