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

‘Karen is a Japanese dominatrix and “rope artist” who ties up her clients in a way that echoes how samurai would bind their prisoners. Her clients are mostly men with high pressure jobs’

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.

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