Cinzia Canneri Wins World Press Photo for Women's Bodies as Battlefields

Italian photographer Cinzia Canneri has won the 2025 World Press Photo award for best long-term project in Africa with 'Women's Bodies as Battlefields,' documenting violence against women in the Horn of Africa. The project, begun in 2017, focuses on Eritrean and Tigrinya women fleeing conflict and repression. Canneri, a former mental health worker from Follonica, Tuscany, quit her job in 2015 to pursue photography. Her black-and-white images capture stories of women in refugee camps and those who join armies for safety. The judges praised her deep trust with subjects, built through years of activism with the Tigrinya and Eritrean communities. The project was produced for the Camille Lepage association. Canneri notes that sexual abuse is used as a weapon of war by both sides, and many women enlist not to fight but to avoid rape in villages. The region remains unstable after the 2020-2022 Tigray war, which killed 600,000 people, and a fragile peace signed in Pretoria in November 2022. Canneri now works in Armenia.