After we visited Japan in the fall of 2023, I started developing ideas that would eventually become designs printed on a series of T-shirts with a touch of Keith Haring. Here are a few of them. None are for sale.

Alongside my street portraits and urban scenes here in Asia, I also devote time to using my camera and its 35 mm prime lens as a blunt painter’s brush. The world around me is a palette of shifting shapes, light and colour; the sensor is my canvas. With the shutter kept open manually – often […]

This scene is from our house on 849 North Alfred Street in West Hollywood. Either my mother or my father took the photograph in 1967, probably using a Kodak Instamatic camera with one of those square bulb flashes (aka Flashcubes) introduced a couple of years prior. I am holding our young cat, Caesar, and Coco, […]

Over the past several months, I’ve been preparing to relaunch my photography-centric site, www.raboffphotography.com, with a print-on-demand shop. The design and implementation were fairly straightforward, thanks in no small part to my buddy and trusty code warrior, Yigit Telyakar. The curation took most of my time, as it does for many artists: choosing the work […]

One battle after another. That’s what Charlotte and I keep saying to each other. Beneath it is a wish for refuge, respite, a little room to relax from the insistent stream of small and large challenges that keep demanding our attention. I suppose it has always been this way: scattered brushfires, each one manageable until […]

Books preserve the ephemeral: places, people, moods, thoughts, memories and moments already beginning to slip from my view and mind. Clearly, I am drawn to what is easily overlooked – the transient, the forgotten, the weathered and the quietly human. In a culture of speed, distraction and digital impermanence, making printed books has become my […]

I’ve always been a cloud freak. Give me a blue sky crowded with clouds over a flawless, empty one any day. A cloudless sky can be beautiful, but it feels finished. Clouds make it restless. I think it’s the constant transformation that draws me in. They build, stretch, dissolve and reform within minutes, turning the […]

During my first Interrail trip through Europe in the summer of 1983, I met all sorts of travelers. Among them was Andrew, a funny, adventurous dude from New York City. We crossed paths on the island of Corfu, and after a week or so of hanging out there, we took the ferry back to mainland […]

Here’s a piece from my ongoing abstract photography project, L’Escapade Éphémère, which I’ve been working on more consistently for about a year. I define L’Escapade Éphémère as a fleeting departure from the defined – where movement loosens light, color, and form, and places shed their certainty, dissolving into something fluid, ambiguous, and briefly liberated from the tyranny […]

Malmö. Friday. Genetic. Had lunch with my rheumatologist the other day. We break bread a couple of times a month and talk about the joy of writing and traveling, and about the increasingly chaotic state of the world. Even though we’re sitting there at the Lebanese restaurant as two private individuals, he understandably can’t quite […]

We have known each other for close to half a century—in a few cases, even longer. We stay in touch almost every day through a WhatsApp chat group, but we can rarely synchronize our schedules for a full reunion. Missing from this photo is Tommy Sahlin, who wasn’t able to make it this past Friday. […]

I did two very unusual things after arriving in Göteborg early this morning. The first was to have a decent breakfast at Jungrens Café along Avenyn – the city center’s main drag and a classic hangout that my friends and I used to frequent for hours on end, almost daily. The food and coffee were […]

Speaking of yellow… this is likely one of the most photographed objects in the Swedish capital. It is an irresistible cliché right across from the Royal Palace. As a commoner, I have not much in common with the Swedish royals; however, as a child visiting Stockholm for the first time while in Sweden for the […]

After protracted and exhaustive deliberations and subsequent bilateral negotiations, the undersigned was recently tendered access and ownership of an unspecified quantity of personal chattel and effects, which had heretofore remained sequestered for a staggering duration of four-and-one-half decades. Intermingled amongst the aforementioned historical artifacts were archival visual representations originating from an epoch wherein the subject’s […]

Wednesday. Sixty-three. 2026 – 1963 = 63. Well, I guess it’s time for another little inventory. In my youth, I aimed so hard not to make it much past 30. Now here I am, more than twice that age, several years older than my mom ever got to be, and with a good chance of […]

This is from a cozy café in Stockholm where I wrote from last week. They closed yesterday for the summer but their interior was filled with colorful textiles that I had to attempt capturing in motion.

I captured this abstract figure of a woman the other day when Charlotte, Elle, and I had lunch at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. It was the second time in two weeks that I was there. The previous visit was with Erica, a friend from New York, and her buddy Erik from Stockholm. Both times we […]