Max J. Raulff was born in Berlin, Germany, into a world where words and images held equal weight. The son of a journalist and a passionate amateur photographer, he first began experimenting with his father’s old Nikon cameras at the age of five. A childhood marked by frequent moves across Germany and the United States—and a family that traveled whenever possible—offered Raulff early opportunities to document the world around him in all its variety.

Alongside these travels, the family’s extensive art library became a source of deep inspiration. Early visual memories include Robert Frank’s seminal book The Americans and the stark, evocative photography of Walker Evans. German street and documentary photographer Barbara Klemm, a close family friend, would also prove a lasting influence.

During his final years of high school, Raulff picked up his first digital camera and began taking on small jobs as an event and concert photographer. After graduation, he set out on a series of solo journeys—usually with just a backpack and no fixed plan—reconnecting with his love for street and documentary photography. It was during these formative years that he developed his own artistic approach, shaped by the credo “inside, looking out”: a philosophy of becoming immersed in his subjects’ lives and environments, to document them from within rather than as an outside observer.

Raulff’s formal education took a different path. Rather than attending a photography school, he chose to study art history, focusing on Italian and Spanish Old Master painters, as well as 20th-century photography from the Americas and Russia, and visual storytelling traditions in French and American film noir and neo-noir. These rich aesthetic worlds—classical and modern, cinematic and painterly—have all left their mark on his photographic style, lending it a unique visual sensibility grounded in both historical depth and contemporary experience.

For many years, Raulff worked almost exclusively in black and white. His engagement with color photography came more recently, alongside a deepening connection to southern Italy, where he has lived and worked following a previous year spent in Rome. This shift brought new textures, tones, and atmospheres into his evolving body of work.

Today, Raulff works with both analog and digital media, using a diverse array of cameras spanning multiple eras. His photographs have been internationally published and awarded, including recognition from the Mono Awards and the Black & White Photo Awards.

For commissions, prints, or inquiries:
maxraulffphotography@gmail.com