Richard Renaldi: Touching Strangers - (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Now available in a new paperback edition, Richard Renaldi's Touching Strangers embodies the human desire to connect despite our differences. Renaldi directed strangers to pose in front of a large-format, 8-by-10-inch view camera in towns and cities all over the United States. These startlingly intimate portraits reveal "humanity as it could be as most of us wish it would be and as it was, at least for those one fleeting moments in time." These relationships may have only lasted for one moment, but the resulting photographs are moving and provocative, and continue to raise profound questions about the possibilities for breaking down social barriers with positive human connection in a diverse society.

Review Quotes

"I love this. Photographer Richard Renaldi put together these photos, Touching Strangers. He had perfect strangers come together and pose for these pictures in really intimate imagery. None of these people know each other. They actually met moments before the photo. . . . To paraphrase something that Nelson Mandela told me: He said that you have to reach out and physically touch people, to bridge the gap between us. To let them feel that love is real." --Will Smith [@willsmith]. Video slideshow of Touching Strangers. Instagram, June 26, 2018.

"Most photographers capture life as it is, but in these strangers, Richard Renaldi shows us humanity as it could be--as most of us wish it would be--and as it was, at least for this one fleeting moment in time."--CBS News

"Renaldi's unusual photographic formula reveals the unlikely ways the body and the heart can influence each other."--Huffington Post

"Richard Renaldi is a matchmaker for tense times . . . "--New York Times Lens Blog

"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."--New York Times