Richard Renaldi

  Touching Strangers

When photographer Richard Renaldi started putting strangers together to make intimate portraits, he had a wish list. “I had a list of what I wanted to catalogue,” he says on the phone from New York, “in particular, certain types with different backgrounds and races. I remember I wanted a Muslim woman in a veil. And a cop. I knew I wanted a cop.”

Since 2007, Richard Renaldi has been working on a series of photographs that involve approaching and asking complete strangers to physically interact while posing together for a portrait. Working on the street with a large format eight-by-ten-inch view camera, Renaldi encounters the subjects for his photographs in towns and cities all over the United States. He pairs them up and invites them to pose together, intimately, in ways that people are usually taught to reserve for their close friends and loved ones. Renaldi creates spontaneous and fleeting relationships between strangers, for the camera, often pushing his subjects beyond their comfort levels. These relationships may only last for the moment the shutter is released, but the resulting photographs are moving and provocative, and raise profound questions about the possibilities for positive human connection in a diverse society. Following an extremely successful Kickstarter effort which raised nine times its goal, Touching Strangers will have an extensive social media campaign. Visit touchingstrangers.org for more information.

Richard Renaldi (born 1968) graduated from New York University with a BFA in photography in 1990. He has presented solo exhibitions both in the United States and abroad, including at Fotografins Hus, Stockholm; Robert Morat Galerie, Hamburg, Germany; and Yossi Milo Gallery, New York. Renaldi's work has also appeared in group exhibitions, including Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video at the International Center of Photography in New York (2003). Touching Strangers is Renaldi's third book, following Figure and Ground (Aperture, 2006) and Fall River Boys (Charles Lane Press, 2009).

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