For nearly nine years, Italian photojournalist Cinzia Canneri has followed stories that war repeatedly pushes out of sight: the lives of Eritrean and Tigrayan women confronting displacement, political repression and systematic sexual violence across Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan.
Her long-term project, Women’s Bodies as Battlefields, opened at the Siena Awards Photo Festival on October 10 and remains on view through November 29, 2026. The exhibition arrives after recognition from World Press Photo and Pictures of the Year International, but its force comes from duration rather than prizes.
A project that changed with the history it witnessed
Canneri began the work in 2017 after meeting members of the Eritrean diaspora in Italy. She then photographed women fleeing indefinite military conscription and state violence. When war erupted in Tigray in 2020, the project expanded to include Tigrayan women whose experiences became intertwined with those of Eritrean refugees.
The resulting photographs trace survival through clinics, refugee camps, border regions and damaged communities. They address rape, torture and forced displacement, but Canneri’s black-and-white images avoid reducing their subjects to evidence of suffering. Moments of care, prayer, solidarity and resistance remain visible beside the violence.
That balance is an ethical achievement. Photojournalism about conflict must communicate urgency without repeating the dehumanization it documents. The Siena exhibition emphasizes Canneri’s attention to context and the women’s own trajectories: decisions to remain, flee, enlist, protect children or rebuild community are presented as complex responses to constrained conditions.
Care as a documentary method
Long-term work changes the relationship between photographer and subject. It allows events to be understood as processes rather than isolated scenes, and it gives the artist time to examine her own position. World Press Photo noted Canneri’s detailed captions, sequencing and acknowledgment of Italy’s colonial history in the region. Those choices make authorship visible instead of pretending that a camera is neutral.
In 2024, Canneri co-founded Cross Looks, a collective of Italian, Eritrean, Tigrayan and Sudanese women creating intersectional narratives around gender, race, class and inequality. The collective extends the project’s central principle: people represented in a story should have agency in how its meaning is formed.
For artists working with trauma, migration or human rights, the project offers a demanding standard. Access is not permission to simplify. A powerful image does not replace accurate context. Recognition does not end responsibility to the people whose lives made the work possible.
Women’s Bodies as Battlefields is extraordinary not because it converts suffering into spectacle, but because it resists that conversion. Across years of political change and personal risk, Canneri has built a visual record in which women appear not as anonymous symbols of war, but as witnesses, decision-makers and authors of survival.