Richard Renaldi: Touching Strangers

Now available in a new paperback edition, Richard Renaldi’s Touching Strangers embodies the human desire to connect despite our differences. Renaldi directed strangers to pose in front of a large-format, 8-by-10-inch view camera in towns and cities all over the United States. These startlingly intimate portraits reveal “humanity as it could be as most of us wish it would be and as it was, at least for those one fleeting moments in time.” These relationships may have only lasted for one moment, but the resulting photographs are moving and provocative, and continue to raise profound questions about the possibilities for breaking down social barriers with positive human connection in a diverse society.

Richard Renaldi graduated from New York University with a BFA in photography in 1990. Renaldi is represented by Benrubi Gallery, New York, and Robert Morat Galerie, Berlin. Other books by Renaldi include Manhattan Sunday (Aperture, 2016), Fall River Boys (2009), and Figure and Ground (Aperture, 2006). In 2015, he was named a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in Photography.

Teju Cole was born in the United States to Nigerian parents and raised in Nigeria. He is the author of Known and Strange Things, Every Day is for the Thief, and Open City, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award; the New York City Book Award for Fiction; the Rosenthal Award, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and the Internationaler Literaturpreis, from the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College and photography critic of the New York Times Magazine. His prose and photography are combined in his most recent book, Blind Spot.