Richard Renaldi - Manhattan Sunday & Touching Strangers - 2014-2016

Manhattan Sunday (2016)
Manhattan Sunday is part homage to a slice of New York nightlife, and part celebration of New York as palimpsest―an evolving form onto which millions of people have and continue to project their ideal selves and ideal lives. In the essay that accompanies his photographs, Richard Renaldi describes his experiences as a young man in the late 1980s who had recently embraced his gay identity, and of finding a home in
the mystery and abandonment of the club, the nightscape, and then finally daybreak,
each offering a
transformation of Manhattan from the known world into a dreamscape of characters acting out their fantasies on a grand stage.

Touching Strangers (2014)
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.