The Cut

The Cut is a long-term photographic project that follows hair as both matter and message. What starts as a craft becomes a lens on power, identity, work, and freedom: how a society regulates bodies, how women negotiate visibility, and how a profession can become a quiet form of autonomy.
Across Bergamo, Lanzarote, India, Chile, and Iraq, the project traces the many meanings carried by hair, from ritual and belonging to stigma and control. In Pakistan, it enters a hairdressing school for Afghan refugees, where training is shaped by uncertainty and the desire for a future that is still negotiable. In Afghanistan, it follows hairdressers forced into clandestine home salons after the Taliban ordered beauty salons to close, showing the domestic spaces where work continues behind curtains and locked doors.
The Cut moves between observation and deliberate construction, using the everyday gestures of cutting, washing, drying, and styling to reveal what is often kept off camera: the thresholds women cross, the roles they are asked to perform, and the fragile spaces they create to keep living and earning.