Touching Strangers
Youmanity reports on a fascinating book, Touching Strangers, by celebrated American street photographer Richard Renaldi. For almost a decade, Renaldi travelled all over the United States in order to seek out that special ‘stranger’ in order to ask him/her to ‘touch’ another ‘stranger’. Inevitably, even reading about this unusual request, one cannot help but think it would involve some kind of ‘public’ sexual act.
What Renaldi really does with Touching Strangers is to awaken in all of us the need (or the urge) to connect with people while at the same time challenging boundaries.
He achieved this by inviting total strangers to pose in ways that people do with family and friends. In so doing the photographer-come-sociologist explored that very fine line defining personal space. Renaldi created spontaneous relationships between strangers for the camera, often pushing his sitters beyond their comfort zone.
“I was interested in the space between people, like in the city. You see a group of people, clustered together, and in that moment in space and time, they are connected. Standing at the lights, waiting to cross the street people look like they’re together, because they’re in a group, but they’re not. They don’t know each other. I wanted to link them,” said Renaldi in a recent interview with Jonathan Blaustein.
The Touching Strangers’ thought-provoking photographs are in fact the result of thought-provoking requests in which people from different ethnicities and/or background end up even holding hands together. Some of the sitters look comfortable together - some pairs even look related to each other (for example, Donna & Eben, Nevada; Jack & Lance, Louisiana), but others freeze.
Their fleeting relationships - only lasting up until the shutter was released - captured in these unique photographs, are moving - at times provocative. They raise profound questions about the importance for positive human connections within a highly diverse society.
Renaldi’s book elicits a response, one in which the reader is compelled to identify with one or other of the parties (or maybe both!). We will never know what thoughts are provoked when looking at the photographs, but, what is certain is that they definitely make EVERYONE think. Sigmund Freud would have a field day with Renaldi’s work.
We feel that, just as it is in Cincinnati, Renaldi’s work should be plastered all over the Tube lines and on the back of London’s double-decker buses - the Touching Strangers photographs do send out an important message. Maybe deep inside we all want to touch and be touched by that one special stranger who lives in our most secret inner world.
To purchase Touching Strangers click HERE
