SHANGHAI BASED PHOTOGRAPHER

Editorial and portrait photography

RAUL ARIANO (1987)

Raul Ariano is an award-winning Italian photographer based in Shanghai (China), specializing in portraits.

He has always been captivated by the expressiveness of human faces and bodies, which can tell stories with no need for words or sounds. An observer of the margins, through his portraits, he has been telling the forgotten tales of those who are often invisible. Since 2014, he has opened a window for the world to peek into the lives of LGBTQ communities in China. Shocked by the first pandemic outbreak in the city of Wuhan, he directed his interest in outcasts into photographing the artificial and yet very real loneliness forced by the world’s first lockdown. Thanks to this project, entitled The Spring Has Yet to Come, Raul was selected to participate in the prestigious 2020 Eddie Adams Workshop, where he won the National Geographic Award.

Raul is a global citizen, and his fascination with the intricacies of human life propels his desire to travel. He was born and raised in Milan, where he began his professional apprenticeship, which he completed in New York City. He then traveled to the Far East as a freelance photographer. After a brief stint in Tokyo, he relocated to Hong Kong before settling in Shanghai, where he currently resides.

His work has been published in prestigious media including The Economist, The New York Times, The British Journal of Photography, Stern, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Le Monde, Bloomberg Markets, Bloomberg Businessweek, Die Zeit, Zeit Magazin, Liberation, Society, and L’Equipe among others.

He is also an accomplished editorial photographer as well as a corporate and commercial one, having worked with clients such as DIOR, Getty Images, IKEA, Philips, Dainese, Volvo, Golden Goose, Hogan, WeWork, McKinsey, Cambridge, and Wedgwood.