Paul Raphaelson
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Paul Raphaelson (b. 1968, New York, New York), is an artist best known for his urban landscape photography.
In the early 1990s, after moving to Providence, Rhode Island, he started producing formally complex, often dark depictions of the urban, suburban, and industrial landscape. This work, which over the next ten years grew into the project titled "Wilderness," continued to evolve when Raphaelson moved to Brooklyn, New York in 1995. The work remained hidden from the larger photography art world until it was discovered by Sandra Phillips of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It later caught the attention of former Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski. The commercial gallery world had trouble finding a place for the work, which blurs many lines between classic formal modernism, the politically aware "New Topographics" photography from the 1970s, highly crafted "fine art" photography, and more contemporary photographic explorations of the banal and ironic.
Raphaelson's grandfather was the playwright and screenwriter Samson Raphaelson, who practiced photography as an amateur in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Raphaelson's ongoing projects include explorations in color, digital carbon pigment printing, and hand-made artist's books.
