Raf Lopes is a Brazilian photographer based in New York City. He bought his first digital camera, a Canon Rebel XTi, at fifteen and learned the basics from its manual. In Rio de Janeiro he photographed concerts, parties and weddings, then moved to São Paulo and later to New York, where he works in IT.
A Fujifilm X-Pro3 led him to street photography in 2019. In 2025 he started shooting film, and he develops, scans and converts his own negatives: more than 150 rolls in 2025 alone. He writes about film, editing and visual identity in his Substack publication Camera Clara, named after Roland Barthes’ book Camera Lucida. His ongoing themes include hand-painted signs, pedestrian crossings and the New York subway on CineStill film.
In our 2026 interview he spoke about a workshop with Steve McCurry that changed how he approaches strangers, and about how he decides which photographs are worth keeping. “A photographer is a collector of moments,” he said.
