Richard Renaldi - "Touching Strangers"

I went into the gallery with a pretty good idea of what I was going to see (I found the title of the exhibit “Touching Strangers” to be pretty self-explanatory). I knew that the photographs were going to show strangers interacting with each other, but I was a little surprised by the intimate poses that the figures were in. If you did not already know that the subjects of the photographs were strangers then (for a lot of the images) it would have been really hard to tell. Some of the people looked more comfortable together than others, but I found that you could read these as being images of people that had contentious relationships. It was interesting to imagine the story behind the images – both real and imagined. I tried to imagine how the people reacted when Renaldi approached them and asked them to pose. Then, I tried to imagine the fictional relationship that the strangers could have had. It was an interesting exercise, and I think that you could use the exhibit as an interesting starting point for a creative writing exercise.

After I saw the exhibit I looked Renaldi up online. I saw that he has published a book under the same name as the exhibition, and I was able to read some of it on his website. I think that the project is a very interesting social experiment, and it reminded me of what I was like when I was little. As a child I was very open to meeting strangers. I would walk up to people in stores and on the street and ask them to be my friend. I think that Renaldi’s photos show an interesting change in the way that we interact with people as we get older. I would never approach a stranger and ask them to be friends. The very idea seems a little naïve, but when you look at Renaldi’s photographs it makes you wonder if we become too closed off as we get older. When I looked at the photographs I made up stories about the people, but all that I knew about them was how they were dressed and how they appeared to be feeling. I could make up entire lives for these people in my head, but I don't actually know them. Everything that I was thinking was completely fabricated. I was judging these people based entirely on their appearances, and I guess that is what we do every day. Part of the reason that I think we grow up and stop approaching strangers is because we become much more judgmental as we get older. We create an image of a person and judge them based on that image. It’s an interesting phenomenon. I don't know if this was part of the point that Renaldi was trying to make, but I think it is interesting to think about regardless.