Richard Renaldi was born in 1968 in Chicago, Illinois, and received his BFA in photography from New York University. Exhibitions of his photographs have been mounted in galleries and museums throughout the United States and Europe, including the House of Photography in Stockholm; The Robert Morat Gallery in Hamburg; and the Aperture Gallery; Bonni Benrubi Gallery; and Yossi Milo Gallery in New York. Renaldi’s work has also been exhibited in numerous group shows, including Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video (2003). In 2006 Renaldi’s first monograph, Figure and Ground, was published by Aperture. His second monograph, Fall River Boys, was released in 2009. Renaldi’s most recent monograph, Touching Strangers, was published by the Aperture Foundation in the spring of 2014.
Fall River Boys collects nine years of photographs taken in Fall River, Massachusetts into a nuanced portrait of a city where young men grow into manhood surrounded by a landscape of idyllic natural beauty, frayed at the margins by darkened relics of an industrial past.
Touching Strangers, according to the New York Times, “pushes the notion of street photography even further. Renaldi meets strangers on the street and asks them to touch or embrace one another; he then photographs these arrangements as group portraits. Rather than recording what he encounters in the city, Renaldi acts as a catalyst. He creates a moment that wouldn’t otherwise have existed, cajoling people to interact in ways they otherwise wouldn’t have…. What makes Renaldi’s photographs thrilling is that, even knowing his strategy, the viewer can’t help fabricating a story about the subjects’ relationship. We weave narratives around them—who 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.”
