Rafael Marxuach

Rafael Marxuach is a Puerto Rico-based photographer and architect whose fine art practice centers on the human body as both subject and artistic instrument. Working across portraiture, street photography, and fine art nude work, his images move between the tender and the erotic — exploring beauty, vulnerability, empowerment, and the politics of the body with equal conviction.

His fine art nude series *Libro Intimidades* (2016–2019) emerged from a period of intense creative collaboration at Rafael Marxuach Studio, the Santurce space he founded and transformed from an abandoned house into one of San Juan's most vital creative environments. The series brought together models, makeup artists, and visual artists united by a shared commitment to image-making — affirming, in Courbet's spirit, that the body outside institutional or ideological constraint is among the most powerful subjects available to an artist.

He also produced Sidewalk Across, a street photography series documenting New York City neighborhoods through a candid, cinematic lens — 34 photographs shot at a fixed 50mm focal length from across 60-foot sidewalks between 2014 and 2016, presenting an alternate, contemplative city that proved eerily prophetic when the world emp...

Rhode Island School of Design, BFA-1985, Architecture-1986
The New School, Media Studies -2011

Sidewalk Across · Solo Exhibition

Rafael Marxuach Studio · San Juan, PR · 2018
Sidewalk Across transforms New York City neighborhoods into intimate cinematic tableaux, documenting anonymous passersby through a candid street photography approach. Shot between 2014 and 2016 at a consistent 50mm focal length from across 60-foot sidewalks, the work explores the duality between the real and the constructed — a tension central to fine art photography. The exhibition presented limited edition original prints on Kodak Endura Mate and Fuji Deep Mate paper.

XY2X Géneros · Solo Exhibition

Rafael Marxuach Studio · San Juan, PR · 2019
XY2X Géneros is a portrait series combining images of individuals across the gender spectrum — cis, trans, and non-binary — into double-exposure photographs that render gender identity both visible and transparent. The final portrait was taken the morning of Hurricane María, September 20, 2017, grounding the work in Puerto Rico's lived history. First presented in December 2018, the series is a call for equality and a declaration against all forms of racial and gender discrimination.