Paul Raphaelson
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Paul Raphaelson (b. 1968, New York, New York, USA), is an American artist best known for 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 grew into the project titled "Wilderness," continued to evolve when Raphaelson moved to Brooklyn, New York in 1995. The work went unnoticed by 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. Commercial galleries, on the other hand, struggled to find 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 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.
