Richard Renaldi - “Touching Strangers”
I absolutely love this project - photography is fast becoming a favourite medium of mine. In this series, Richard Renaldi asks strangers to pose with each other, touching, in a photograph. It reminds me of a discussion I had in a class last term about the Free Hugs public performance work. While talking about its potential effects in the particular setting of the city, a fellow student commented that she found the idea of hugging a stranger unsettling, referring to a homeless man in a certain area of the city who solicits hugs (not affiliated with the Free Hugs campaign). I have noticed a trend, in myself and friends, towards the germaphobic and strangerphobic. On a basic level, we seem to resist engagment in the urban realm where we are inundated with advertising and other media representations.
I find the interesting new spaces created in these photographs, in these encounters, to be very beautiful, moving and complex. The physical gestures that indicate discomfort, hesitation, wary trust, and maybe in some cases a kind of relief or yielding. In an interview with Jörg Colberg, Renaldi describes the process of asking for his subjects to pose:
It is rather awkward to approach someone and ask them if they are interested in touching another stranger for a photograph. I think maybe my nervous, slightly pleading voice kicks in, combined with a little charm. I generally give them my spiel about being a photographer working on a project, and I try to have my book, Figure and Ground, to show to them. It was never easy - though most everyone who agreed to participate was a good sport. Most people eventually grasped the concept, and often it seemed to be a pleasant distraction from their day. As far as telling them what I was after, I was initially not sure myself.
I have only posted a few I found particularly interesting, hardly representative of the complexity of this series - I highly recommend checking it out on his site for larger images and other encounters.
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