Paul Raphaelson (born 1968, New York City), 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 S. Phillips of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It later caught the attention of former Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski, who acquired prints on behalf of private collections.[1]
Raphaelson began working in color in 2005, continuing to explore urban spaces bordering the occupied and abandoned, and the residential and industrial.
In 2012 he brought a hand camera into the New York City Subway, photographing passengers through the reflections, obfuscations, and framing of the train windows.[2]
In 2013 he was the last photographer granted permission to photograph the Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, before its 2014 demolition and redevelopment. He expanded the project beyond ruin photographs, to encompass document, industrial history, and a philosophical exploration of the significance of ruin art in post-industrial popular culture. This project culminated in the 2017 book, Brooklyn's Sweet Ruin: Relics and Stories of the Domino Sugar Refinery.[3]
Raphaelson's grandfather was the playwright and screenwriter Samson Raphaelson, who became a passionate amateur photographer and writer on photography in the last two decades of his life.
Raphaelson's ongoing projects include experiments with images and text, and photographic noise.[4]