BIOGRAPHY
JOAKIM LLOYD RABOFF
Joakim Lloyd Raboff (b. 1963, Santa Monica, California) is a Swedish-American visual artist working primarily in photography. Born and raised in California, he moved to Sweden in 1978 and has lived there for most of his adult life.
Raboff studied at Gotland Art College from 1990 to 1992, where the artists teaching and lecturing there encouraged him to pursue his own visual direction. During his years on Gotland, he established his first studio and exhibition space near Norderport in Visby. His early work centred on painting, followed by solo exhibitions in Gothenburg, including at Galleri Gibraltar and Galleri Viking.
That background in painting remains fundamental to his photography. Colour, composition, surface, abstraction and the tension between what an image depicts, what it suggests and the narratives it allows to emerge are recurring elements throughout his work.
Raboff’s photographs move between landscape, architecture, industrial environments and abstraction. Rather than attempting to describe places comprehensively, he is drawn to fragments: structures, surfaces, horizons, movement, weather, decay and transient shifts of light. Familiar surroundings are often reduced to form, colour and geometry, allowing the photographed world to hover somewhere between observation and interpretation.
Place remains important, but rarely as destination. Photographs made across Scandinavia, Europe, Asia, Africa and the United States are connected less by geography than by a sustained interest in transformation, impermanence and traces of human presence.
Abandoned industrial structures, altered landscapes, urban surfaces and open natural environments become different expressions of the same underlying fascination: what remains, what changes and what disappears.
Travel has been part of this visual exploration since his youth. During the 1980s and early 1990s, Raboff moved extensively between Sweden, the United States and Southeast Asia, painting and photographing along the way. These experiences helped shape an increasingly selective way of seeing, concerned less with recording where he had been than with isolating what had arrested his attention.
Photography eventually became his principal medium, while the sensibilities developed through painting continued to shape the images.
Several of Raboff’s projects have evolved over many years. His extensive documentation of Västra Hamnen in Malmö resulted in a ten-volume series of books, followed by two commissioned books devoted to Santiago Calatrava’s Turning Torso. In 2010, Malmö City commissioned 5,000 copies of one of the Västra Hamnen books for presentation at the Swedish Pavilion during the Shanghai World Expo, where the work was accompanied by a five-metre photographic panorama.
His 2019 project Malmö Upside Down culminated in a large outdoor exhibition in Slottsparken, Malmö, presenting aerial photographs that deliberately disrupted conventional perspectives of the city. Approximately 2,500 people visited the exhibition during its two-week run. The long-running Silhouette Surfers series, begun in California in 2014, similarly developed across photography, exhibition and book form, concluding with the publication of Silhouette Surfers in 2023.
Books have become another central component of Raboff’s artistic output. His photographic and written publications move between visual essay, documentary observation and personal reflection. They include works on cities, architecture, industrial history, human experience, ageing, fear and abandonment. Among them are Vi är Malmö Opera, Turning Torso, Varvsstaden – Borta men inte glömd, MALMÖ, L.A., PHOBIAS & FEARS, The Aging Man’s Survival Guide and Abandoned – The Beauty in What Remains.
For Raboff, the book is not simply a vehicle for reproducing photographs. It is a physical extension of the work itself, allowing images, text, memory and sequence to create relationships that cannot exist in a single photograph. This interest in the permanence of the printed object also informs his current focus on fine-art printing.
Alongside books and exhibitions, a curated selection of Raboff’s photographs is now available as fine-art prints. Drawn from bodies of work developed over several decades, these images are intended to take on a physical presence – to be seen, lived with and enjoyed.
Raboff continues to work across long-term photographic projects concerned with nature, the built environment, abstraction, memory and change.
Joakim Lloyd Raboff lives and works in Malmö, Sweden.
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