Richard Renaldi: Touching Strangers

(Paperback)

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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.

Reviews

I love this. Photographer Richard Renaldi put together these photos, Touching Strangers. He had perfect strangers come together and pose for these pictures in really intimate imagery. None of these people know each other. They actually met moments before the photo. . . . To paraphrase something that Nelson Mandela told me: He said that you have to reach out and physically touch people, to bridge the gap between us. To let them feel that love is real. Will Smith [@willsmith]. Video slideshow of Touching Strangers. Instagram, June 26, 2018.
Renaldi's unusual photographic formula reveals the unlikely ways the body and the heart can influence each other.Huffington Post
Most photographers capture life as it is, but in these strangers, Richard Renaldi shows us humanity as it could beas most of us wish it would beand as it was, at least for this one fleeting moment in time.CBS News
The viewer cant help fabricating a story about the subjects relationship. We weave narratives around themwho they are, the unlikely tenderness that might exist between strangers. These counterfactuals force us to confront the limits of what we know, from our own experiences, to make up common social interactions.New York Times
Richard Renaldi is a matchmaker for tense times . . . New York Times Lens Blog

Author Bio

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. 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.