Richard Renaldi: Touching Strangers

Richard Renaldi: Touching Strangers

Photographer Richard Renaldi, originally from Chicago, has lived in New York City since 1986. In Touching Strangers, Renaldi takes a nontraditional approach to contemporary street photography. In this photographic essay, using a large format 8-by-10-inch view camera, Renaldi has produced a collection of images that involve approaching and asking complete strangers to pose together for a portrait. In towns and cities across the United States, Renaldi has interacted with hundreds of subjects for his photographs since he started the project in 2007.

Renaldi creates impromptu and momentary interactions between strangers for the camera. These short-lived encounters fade when the shutter is released, but the resulting photographs are emotive and provocative. Despite knowing Renaldi’s strategy for creating Touching Strangers, viewers are nonetheless compelled to weave fabricated narratives about the subjects’ relationship—a reflection on humankind’s quest for positive social interaction.

Richard Renaldi received a BFA in photography from New York University in 1990. Exhibitions of his photographs have been organized in galleries and museums throughout the United States, Asia, and Europe, including the House of Photography, Stockholm; the Robert Morat Gallery, Hamburg; the Aperture Gallery; Bonni Benrubi Gallery; and Yossi Milo Gallery in New York. Renaldi’s work has also been exhibited in numerous group exhibitions, including Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video (2003). In 2006, Renaldi’s first monograph, Figure and Ground, was published by Aperture magazine. His second monograph, Fall River Boys, was released in 2009. The Aperture Foundation published Renaldi’s most recent monograph, Touching Strangers, in 2014.

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