We are proud to announce that La soglia (The Threshold) by Cristina Cosmano is the winning project of Female Portraits in Dialogue: from Historical to Contemporary Photography, the international open call promoted by Exhibit Around APS in collaboration with the Fototeca dei Civici Musei di Storia ed Arte of the City of Trieste, with the support of the Consiglio regionale del Friuli Venezia Giulia.

Cristina Cosmano’s images will be displayed at the Museo Sartorio during Trieste Photo Days 2026 (22–25 October), in dialogue with works by authors active between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Giuseppe Wulz, Marion Wulz, Ugo Borsatti, Adriano de Rota, Emil Rabending, Carl Pietzner and Giovanni Battista Berra.

La soglia is a global portrait project built on a visual paradox: portraying women without showing their faces, wholly or in part. The portraits were made across countries, religions and social systems: contexts in which the female body is regulated by law, environments in which visibility is culturally negotiated, situations in which the pressure is subtler but equally present. When the face disappears, other elements take its place: posture, hands, clothing, the relationship with space, body language. Identity is constructed elsewhere, and the viewer is forced to look longer, to seek the person beyond the expected focal point. Despite geographical and cultural differences, a striking visual continuity emerges: women who are present, active, central to their spaces, yet visually screened from view. A mapping of how different societies, religions and traditions shape the ways in which women can be seen, and how, despite everything, their presence remains undeniable. How much of a person do we need to see in order to recognise their existence?

The selection of works and the curation of the exhibition are entrusted to Claudia Colecchia, head of the Fototeca and the Library of the Civici Musei di Storia ed Arte of Trieste, who motivated her choice as follows:

La soglia by Cristina Cosmano stands out for the strength and clarity of its investigation into the language of portraiture. Through images in which the female face is hidden, fragmented or only partially accessible, the project calls into question one of the founding elements of photographic tradition: the face as the privileged site of identity, recognition and social representation.

The work does not simply depict women from different backgrounds, but directly interrogates the ways in which the feminine is made visible in the history of photography and in contemporary cultures. In this sense, the project establishes a particularly fertile dialogue with the Fototeca’s historical holdings, where the photographic portrait originates as a device for fixing identity, social presence and the recognisability of the subject.

The work thus opens a timely reflection on the relationship between presence and invisibility, between identity and representation, between what is shown and what remains withheld from view.

Honourable mentions

We are also pleased to award two honourable mentions.

Huellas (Spanish for “traces” or “footprints”) by Yinna Higuera is a project of great sensitivity and originality, developing a poetic and material relationship between photography, memory and nature through chlorophyll printing on natural leaves. The quality of the work lies substantially in its physical and organic dimension: the pieces do not function simply as images, but as living, fragile objects, intimately bound to the natural support on which they are made — a material dimension that is central to the artist’s practice and to its conceptual and aesthetic force.

Moving Mountains: Portraits of Contemporary Womanhood by Marylise Vigneau brings together women photographed across diverse geographies, contexts and conditions of life, forming a fragmented yet interconnected portrait of contemporary womanhood. Dancers, volunteers, artists, survivors, workers, mothers and witnesses of their own time: each image is an encounter between individual experience and the broader forces of history, conflict, memory and resilience. A work that asks how contemporary womanhood is seen, lived and represented.

Both projects will be on display at the Mercato Coperto during Trieste Photo Days 2026 (22–25 October).