The Cut
Silvia Alessi, Italy
Born in Bergamo, Italy, Silvia Alessi discovered reportage photography during a trip to Asia and has since traveled extensively, pursuing her passion for “telling stories worthy of being told.” Her artistic process blends reportage with an openness to diverse cultures, resulting in award-winning projects like “Skin” (India), “Beyond the Line” (Iraqi Kurdistan), and “Maze of Metamorphosis” (Japan). Before each project, she conducts extensive research to understand the social context and develop a visual language that effectively conveys her concept.
Afghan refugee students raise their hairdryers like weapons of liberation. For these women — displaced, prohibited, and erased from public life in their own country — a beauty school in exile becomes something more than a place of learning. It becomes a space where a forbidden profession is reclaimed, where hands that were forced to stop can begin again. Peace, for them, is not abstract. It is the right to hold a tool and call it your own.
The Cut: From Training to Hidden Practice is part of a long-term body of work on hair as a site of identity, labour, power, and restriction. This chapter focuses on Afghan women whose profession exists today across two opposing conditions: open training in exile and hidden practice under prohibition.
The work was developed between Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Pakistan, I photographed Afghan refugee students attending beauty courses, where hairdressing remains visible, teachable, and collective. In these classrooms, mirrors, mannequin heads, scissors, dryers, and repeated gestures suggest more than professional training: they mark a temporary space where skill can still be transmitted, shared, and imagined as a path toward income and self-determination.
In Afghanistan, that same profession has been pushed out of public view. After the Taliban ordered beauty salons to close, many women lost one of the very few socially accepted occupations available to them. But the profession did not disappear. It adapted. Hairdressing moved into private houses, hidden rooms, and improvised interiors, where women continue to work in secrecy, with caution and limited means. What was once ordinary became clandestine.
This project follows that shift. It moves from formation to concealment, from the group to the isolated room, from visibility to risk. Rather than relying on spectacle, the work stays close to the material and emotional reality of these spaces: bodies bent over clients, hands at work, chairs waiting, mirrors reflecting partial selves, domestic rooms turned into temporary salons. These elements reveal how a profession can become a fragile but vital zone of income, dignity, intimacy, and persistence.
I approach this story from a double position. I have worked as a hairdresser for over thirty years, and photography later became my second language. This allows me to enter these spaces not only as a documentarian, but as someone who understands the gestures, discipline, and physical intimacy of salon work. The images are shaped by that proximity.
By connecting beauty schools in Pakistan with hidden salons in Afghanistan, The Cut documents not only the suppression of women’s work, but also its continuation under pressure. It is a story of displacement, restriction, and female presence, told through a profession that survives even when it is forced out of sight.