With Caring for Our Past, Chiara Negrello turns her gaze inside Italian homes, where care takes on invisible yet essential forms. The project tells the stories of Ukrainian women who have migrated to Italy to work as caregivers, central figures in a fragile domestic balance built on affection and responsibility. The idea was born from a personal bond of the photographer: Lyubov, the caregiver who looked after Chiara Negrello’s grandmother after COVID.

From that daily encounter came an awareness of a collective phenomenon that weaves together intimacy and distance. Negrello, born in 1995 and now a Canon Ambassador, has always steered her research toward stories in which social mobility and everyday life intersect with the female sphere, and this work is a direct extension of that approach.

After the Russian invasion of 2022, the project expanded, becoming an inquiry that brings together personal experience and shared memory. The photographs convey the complexity of a life suspended between two worlds: on one side, the everyday practice of care in Italy, made up of small, repeated gestures; on the other, the distance from one’s family, the pain of separation, and the weight of a war followed from afar. Chiara Negrello captures the emotional tension of these divided lives, telling with delicacy the line between work and affection, between belonging and loss.