Steve Raber went nowhere without a camera. Raised in Eden Valley, Washington, between Port Angeles and the wild edge of Olympic National Park, he grew up watching closely, attuned to the quiet conversations between people and the places that shaped them. He left home in his late teens, moving between jobs and households — Steve was easy to like and making lasting friends everywhere he landed.

By 1982 he had moved to Seattle and enrolled in the photography program at Everett Community College, giving himself over to the medium completely — history, mechanics, darkroom. He soon found his way into the city's pre-AIDS fashion and club scene.

Raber along with a tight group of creative friends moved from Seattle to Los Angeles in 1984. That became his defining move and year. Along Hollywood Boulevard, inside clubs like the Fire Fly and the Frolic Room, and at the drag balls held in the Palladium Theater, Raber found the people mainstream culture looked past — and photographed them with total clarity and affection. His approach never changed: he'd see someone who caught his eye have an in depth conversation and when he felt he had the trust of the subject he simply asked, ”can I take your picture?” He did the technical photography work and let his subject freely express themselves.

Steve photographs captured his subjects with the dignity and respect he felt for for all of them, it was his mantra. The work was captured “pre-AIDs”, the result are a collection of photos that while looking at them prompts the reaction:

“ It's like being invited to the best party ever — the one you never received an invitation to.”

It is important to note, what gives the "pre-AIDS” it's real weight as a marker for Steve’s work: is not a chronological label, it's the line between the world he was documenting and the world that took many of the people in his photographs. The book positions his images as preserving something that was about to disappear — describing them at one point as capturing a world on the cusp of change, a nightlife scene where people still felt free to act on desire without fear. Viewed that way, his archive functions almost like an unintentional time capsule — snapshots of ordinary joy and self-expression taken by someone who, a few years later, would be sitting with a dying friend from that same circle.

In the late 1988, the AIDs epidemic hit home, John Leitch — the center of Raber's creative friend circle — fell ill with AIDS, and Raber and circle of friends stayed close through his final months. Steve drove John through the city in his great white Cadillac just so he could feel the air. Leitch died in 1989.

Raber remained in Los Angeles, turning his eye toward automotive photography, where his command of light — how it struck, bent, and shot across chrome and paint became his signature. He understood reflection and refraction not as technical obstacles but as raw material, coaxing new expression from a car's surface with every angle of light he chose. That mastery carried his work into national campaigns.

In early 2020 Steve contracted COVID-19, and complications, compounded by a congenital kidney condition, gradually wore down his heart. He died peacefully at home, his large-format Hasselblad still sitting in the living room, never far from reach after five decades. He was loved by all who met him.