Raphael Mazzucco is one of the world’s most influential fashion
photographers and contemporary artists, critically acclaimed for his singular eye and captivating aesthetic.
After years spent honing his craft in Italy, France and Amsterdam, his arrival in New York City garnered attention from some of fashion’S elite and he went on to create iconic imagery for the likes of Victoria’sSecret, Guess Jeans, L’Oréal, Ralph Lauren and Bergdorf Goodman.
His imagery has appeared in L’Officiel, French and Italian Vogue, Marie
Claire, Playboy and Vanity Fair, featuring not only his editorial fashion
imagery but celebrity portraiture of notable actors including Benicio Del Toro, Matt Damon, Susan Sarandon and Elizabeth Banks.
A two-year tour of exhibitions in Milan, Florence, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Singapore, Los Angeles, Miami and New York City was met with critical praise. Following the tour, Raphael immediately launched into an artwork and photo essay book collaboration with music impresario Jimmy Iovine and rap producer Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs. He has been
profiled by major titles like The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and The New York Times. Paris Vogue has also featured Raphael several times, commenting that his style ‘oozes sensuality and charm’.
Raphael’s artistic visual narrative captures the human form set against a backdrop of startling landscapes spanning the continent from Icelandic glaciers to African wildlife, and the outback of Western Australia to Vietnamese rice paddies. He incorporates these documentary forms into building a layered narrative through paint,
collages, and hand-lettered text. Through these works, we journey alongside Raphael through terrains both geographic and emotional. Raphael Mazzucco is irrefutably a lover of life. His passion for synchronicity between his subjects and settings, coupled with a sensual aesthetic, has arguably resulted in some of the most relevant photography today, heralding a new age of art. A native of Vancouver, Canada, Raphael lives in Lebanon, Connecticut,
with his wife Lisa, son Sascha and daughter-in-law Celine.
T H E A R T I S T
Definition: An innate love of life and affinity with the living world.
Raphael Mazzucco is irrefutably a lover of life. His passion
for synchronicity between his subjects and settings,
coupled with an epicurean aesthetic, has resulted in
arguably some of the most relevant photography today,
taking the world of fine art by storm. Mazzucco’s work
heralds a new age of art. Raphael acknowledges his zeal,
and references his instinctive kinship with all living matter.
From fellow man, to his relationship with habitats and the
natural world, his affinity knows no bounds. Nowhere is
this more clearly demonstrated than in his work.
His collections are based upon, relies on and draws from
connections. The connection between life, our lives, and
the life forces around us. The connections made when we
step barefoot on earth, submerge our face in water or rest
the length of our bodies against a towering tree; these
connections transcend taxonomy and unite us through
acknowledging our commonality of energy and vitality.
As the alchemists, sorcerers and astrologers of bygone
years knew, to be truly powerful one had to harness the
power of the natural world; thus Mazzucco has formed
an alliance with nature in his bodies of work to coax full
elemental beauty through his lens. No detail, no element
or biome is deemed irrelevant or unworthy of notice. Their
very existence dictates that they contribute in some way to
the ecosystems and partnerships celebrated in his art.
Mazzucco’s mastery of staging allows the viewer to live
and breathe the moments captured by his photography.
Hinting at a canopy of trees, laden with air so heavy and
so humid, allows his female subjects to exude not only
their God-given beauty, but a sensual and languorous heat
that, without the climatic context, would feel staged and
inauthentic. As an artist, Mazzucco addresses his audience
and asserts that the gentle flurry of a butterfly’s wings, and
the seductive flutter of a woman’s eyelashes, hold equal
gravitas in his compositions.
To be in the presence of his work is to walk
the equator, taking in every vantage, experiencing every
sensation, greeting every living being and absorbing
every detail. His female subjects are your signposts,
directing you between savannahs, prairies, deltas,
grasslands and rainforests, demanding your attention and
commanding that your focus falls not only on them, but
on the waterfalls, woodlands and water lilies that share
their spotlight. An observer will see Mazzucco working
within the framework of finessed photography, with the
applied expression of painting, to influence the sensation
of movement throughout his work.. One has the
distinct impression that he is leading us to recognise that
the breeze causing his subjects’ hair to billow so pleasingly
in some pieces, also gifts us the endemic ripples in sand
dunes, the gentle swell of waves on shorelines; elements so
unassumingly mesmerising one might overlook them in the
pursuit of “beauty”.
Mazzucco does not ask us to choose between the appeal of
nature versus socially imposed standards of attractiveness,
rather he would like us to recognise that both have a part
to play, and neither reach their true potential without the
other. Drawing on the theory of holism, which presents the
idea that natural systems should be viewed as as a whole
rather than individual elements, his body of work is an
unadulterated celebration of splendour.