Private Outlands is an itinerant photographic project by photographer Lisa Mazzei, a body of work that moves between Italy and the United States in 2025 and questions the imagery tied to “frontier” spaces. The title holds together two opposing dimensions: private and outlands, intimacy and the vastness of the land.

The term outland carries with it a narrative legacy made of distant, inhospitable environments. Mazzei overturns that perspective and builds a new frontier forged by women: her images show female bodies inhabiting wild landscapes with no heroic tension, no conflict, affirming their naturalness beyond social constructs.

From the pinewoods of the Maremma to the rocks of Tuscany, from the high plains of Abruzzo to the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, the protagonists move nude or semi-nude through open spaces, suspended between the epic and the intimate. The bodies do not conquer the landscape: they pass through it and merge with it. It is a renewed relationship between body and land, finding its balance in the simplicity of the gesture and in natural light.

A key element of the project is the film border visible in every image, which cuts out a fragment of reality and holds it in place. This detail is not only aesthetic: it is a statement of method. The frame becomes a protected space where this new possibility of existence can “quietly live,” living in silence. Analog photography—with its materiality and its edges—reinforces the intimate dimension of the work, setting it against the immensity of the landscapes.

In Private Outlands the narrative becomes more essential: nothing remains but the body and nature. The result is an imagery that takes wild space away from the masculine rhetoric of conquest and returns it as a territory of awareness and self-determination for the female body.