Studies in intimacy, fracture, and the beauty of what is normally kept hidden.
Alberto Maccari began as art director for a lingerie brand. Stepping behind the camera himself for its catalogues, he found the question that has shaped his work ever since: not how a woman looks, but how she wants to be seen. That instinct became the foundation for everything that followed. His work has appeared in LIONS, INSTITUTE, Boudoir Inspirations, Art of Nudes and NORMAL, and has been recognised at PX3 Paris, the International Photography Awards, the Tokyo International Foto Award and the Monochrome Awards. His photographic essay Girls of Milan, built from more than one hundred sessions across a year, was presented at the Saatchi Gallery, distributed through The Photographers' Gallery and included in the AIGA selection. Private Distortion continues that same instinct: an interest in what a camera can find in a subject once the posing stops.
Private Distortion is an ongoing photographic series that investigates the body not as a fixed image, but as a fragile field of perception.
The distortion at the core of this series originates in the optical behaviour of light through glass: refraction, treated here as both a physical phenomenon and a conceptual model. Translated into a controlled photographic process, it becomes a repeatable gesture, one that fragments the body not randomly but according to an internal visual logic.
Through this process the figure is fractured, stretched, compressed. The body never appears whole. It flickers between visibility and disappearance, resisting the certainty of the gaze and denying immediate consumption. What begins as a formal gesture gradually becomes psychological. The viewer cannot possess the image at once. The eye must slow down, adjust, reconstruct. In this unstable encounter, looking becomes intimate, not because the body is revealed, but because it is withheld.
Private Distortion challenges the classical tradition of the photographic nude as clarity and exposure. Here, intimacy emerges from fracture, from interruption, from the impossibility of full access. The image does not offer itself. It asks to be completed. The series moves beyond representation toward a perceptual experience in which the act of seeing becomes slow, personal, and inward.
A search for faces without the practiced calm of posing. Women watched for the instant the social mask drops, shot only in the gap it leaves behind.
“I went looking for faces without masks, without those polite smiles that smell of posing. I searched for them the way you look for a secret, watching their eyes before anything else, waiting for that tiny moment when the armour falls away. In those cracks, that is where I tried to shoot.”
Inner darkness rendered literal. Skin coated in a deep, uniform black before the sitter is asked to embody, one by one, the emotions of an ancient list.
“I had been waiting for more than an hour while the makeup artist coated her body in a thick black cream, something glossy and absolute, like a distilled version of the human soul. I barely had time to get behind the camera before she erupted into a furious scream. My finger hit the shutter out of pure reflex. Her embodiment of Wrath is the one I like most.”
The series' clearest statement of method: the body lit only by opposing hues, pulled apart and reassembled by contrast alone.
“Everyone remembers those cardboard 3D glasses, two colours fighting for the same image, forcing the mind to stitch reality back together. The forms did not disappear. They slipped into a new dimension, one where shape becomes suggestion and truth survives only as an afterimage in the viewer's mind.”
Accidental beauty, kept rather than corrected: proof that the series trusts a mistake more than a rehearsed pose.
“When I handed her the jewellery, she fastened the necklace the wrong way around and let the pieces fall in places they weren't meant to be. It worked, almost accidentally. She shifted a little, unaware that the line of her back had already given the shot everything it needed.”
Ornament used as interruption rather than decoration. Gold and light placed to catch the eye before it reaches the face, so that arrival, when it comes, feels earned.
The most physical distortion in the series: features dissolving into streams of red and shadow, as though the print itself were reacting to heat.
Disorientation offered as trust. Liquefied colour and reflection made to mirror a feeling of losing one's footing, not to illustrate it from the outside.
“When she was standing there, completely naked except for the heels that gave her ten borrowed centimetres, she walked up to me and offered her hand as if it were the most natural thing in the world. That warm collision opened the door to everything that followed: the lights, the reflections, and the strange honesty that sometimes appears only when nothing is left to hide.”
A rare moment of stillness in the series. Resilience photographed straight, without the glitch or blur used elsewhere to earn it.
Grace held at an angle. Chromatic distortion used to unsettle a pose that would otherwise read as simply regal.
A closing collision of classical portraiture and digital chaos. Layered glitch used to keep an otherwise composed image slightly, deliberately, out of control.
The title borrows from Moshe Dayan, the general remembered above all for the black patch that covered one eye. Here the reference becomes a private joke about vision half given, half withheld, in keeping with a series built on exactly that trade.
Most of what defines this series is decided before the camera is picked up. A makeup artist works for an hour to bring skin to an even, absolute black. A dancer's ten borrowed centimetres of heel change how a whole frame is going to move. A necklace goes on backwards and stays that way, because correcting it would cost the shot its honesty.
None of it is improvised carelessly. It is directed toward a single, repeated goal: getting past the moment a sitter remembers she is being photographed. A short film from these sessions accompanies the curatorial note that opens this presentation.
A body of work about the cost and the reward of showing what is usually kept out of frame. Available for exhibition, publication, and acquisition enquiries.