Uganda, 2025.
Lynette, 27, was attacked with acid when she was three.
One evening, she and her sisters were gathered in the house, sitting on the carpet for dinner.
Two masked men came through the door throwing some buckets full of acid at the group of women who got up by clicking leaving only Lynette on the floor, too small to move quickly.
The main suspects of the attack fell on Lynette’s stepmother, who seems to have harbored a grudge against her daughters and wanted to eliminate them. Soon after the attack she was arrested, but managed to bribe the guards and remained in jail for a little while and has since disappeared.
The acid caused Lynette to have severe head, neck and back injuries. She was hospitalized for three years and underwent numerous surgeries.
But the pain, especially the psychological one, has never healed.
Growing up, she married a man who, after always having despised and humiliated her, abandoned her with two children of eight and six years.
Lynette lives in a small village in the arid central part of Uganda: she has never met anyone in her condition and for years believed she was the only one to have suffered such brutal violence. A lifetime of suffering, fear and shame.
She never showed the scars, not even to her two children (only to her older sister who visited her in the hospital and looked after her, and later to her husband) and never had herself photographed.
I meet and I tell her about my photographic project "Survivors", dedicated to the victims of these horrible crimes.
Lynette cries as she tells me about her life, but is determined to be photographed: "I want to show my scars, I consider them my true portrait because they describe my daily mood.