Richard Renaldi is a New York-based photographer known for his thought-provoking monographs like “Fall River Boys” (Charles Lane Press, 2009), “Manhattan Sunday” (Aperture, 2016), “I Want Your Love” (Super Labo, 2018), and more. Today, we’re excited to revisit his acclaimed series “Touching Strangers,” which began in 2007. This series features intimate portraits of strangers who, despite being unfamiliar with each other, are captured in close physical contact, challenging our ideas about connection and personal space. The Aperture monograph was published in 2014, and this year marks its 10th anniversary. Renaldi has unveiled a new online gallery featuring 84 images from the series that were not included in the original book, many of which have never been seen before. Scroll down to explore these captivating photographs! More info: Instagram | renaldi.com | x.com | flickr.com “It feels like ten years went by really really fast,” Renaldi reflected on his “Touching Strangers” series. “I think the project is aging well and that the themes and concepts that the work raises are just as relevant today. One insight that I gained after putting the work out into the world was that the viewer, even knowing that the people in the photographs were strangers, would still have a strong impulse to create a narrative about the relationship of the people in the photographs. That the impulse to understand or imply a relationship between two or more subjects who were total strangers and not related in any way other than their common humanity would be surprising to me.” “Working on the streets as an environmental portraitist, I was aware of the mass of humanity constantly intersecting on the streets and avenues of New York City. Attentive to the reality that the majority of the millions of people in the city are strangers to each other, I was curious about the connections that exist between us regardless of that fact and the potential for intimacy between strangers. Thinking of the people in the city linked by an invisible adhesive, I wanted to make those connections visible and so when I started working on ‘See America by Bus’ and photographing strangers together on communal benches at Greyhound Bus Stations, it occurred to me that someday I could try and intentionally make portraits of strangers together like the way I was currently doing on those bus station benches but pose them somewhere out in the world and ask them to step outside of their zones of comfort and physically touch each other. What would that look like?” “I do think that the universal desire for intimacy is a constant. Illustrating a world where people of various races, religious affiliations, sexes, sexual preferences, and classes mix, interact, and pair up with each other certainly has as much value today as it did a decade ago. I think one thing I didn’t see on the horizon was the rise of fascism and authoritarianism that has spread across the world. Brexit and Trumpism are certainly forces where the consequences were to tear people apart and sow divisions and distrust from one another, which is a contrast, I think, with the intent of ‘Touching Strangers’, which, at its core, is about bringing people together.” Follow Bored Panda on Google News! Follow us on Flipboard.com/@boredpanda! Please use high-res photos without watermarks Ooops! Your image is too large, maximum file size is 8 MB.
