Richard Renaldi: Touching Strangers

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 8-by-10-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.

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 is a photographer, essayist, and author born in the United States to Nigerian parents and raised in Nigeria. He is the author of two works of fiction: Every Day is for the Thief, a novella, and the novel 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 a contributor to the New York Times, the New Yorker, and other publications.