For seven years, starting in 2007, the American photographer Richard Renaldi stopped people on the street who had never met, and asked them to pose together as if they were family, friends or a couple. They held hands, leaned on each other's shoulders or stood in a loose embrace while he made a single portrait with a large 8x10 view camera. Then they went their separate ways. The series is called Touching Strangers, and it became one of the best-known portrait projects of the 2010s.
The short video further down is a CBS News "On the Road" report from 2013 in which correspondent Steve Hartman follows Renaldi at work in New York. It shows how quickly a forced pose can turn into something that looks, and sometimes feels, real.
Who is Richard Renaldi?
Renaldi was born in Chicago in 1968, moved to New York in 1986 and graduated from New York University with a BFA in photography in 1990. His earlier books, Figure and Ground (2006) and Fall River Boys (2009), are quiet, large-format portraits of ordinary Americans. Touching Strangers grew out of another series, Bus Travelers, in which he photographed passengers sharing the cramped, oddly intimate space of long-distance buses.
He later won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015 for Manhattan Sunday, a series about LGBT New Yorkers on the streets in the early hours after a night out.
How Touching Strangers works
The method is simple, which is part of its power. Renaldi picks two or more passers-by, often people who look as if they would never cross paths, explains the idea and asks if they will take part. If they agree, he arranges their bodies so they touch: an arm around a waist, a head on a shoulder, a hand laid on a chest. Because the view camera is slow, each picture takes several minutes to set up, so the sitters have to hold the pose and stay physically close long enough for the awkwardness to pass.
He photographed hundreds of people in towns and cities across the United States, not only in New York. The project was published as a book by Aperture in 2014, with an introduction by the writer Teju Cole, and was shown at the Aperture Foundation, the Loyola University Museum of Art in Chicago and in Terminal 3 of San Francisco International Airport in 2015.
The photograph at the top
The opening picture is typical of the series. A uniformed police officer stands against a wall of weathered grey boards with his arm across the shoulders of a young woman in a stars-and-stripes top. Her hand rests on his forearm and both look straight at the lens with neutral faces. Without context you might read it as a father and daughter, a protective older brother, or something less comfortable. Once you know they had only just met, the image becomes a question about how much of a "relationship" we invent ourselves when we look at a photo.
The CBS video: strangers on a New York street
The 2013 report, titled "Photographer proves strangers are friends you haven't met yet", follows Renaldi as he asks passers-by to pose as couples, friends or relatives, then matches them up and guides their poses. Watch the faces: the first seconds are often stiff and self-conscious, and the interest lies in how the mood shifts while the people hold still for the big camera.
Why the pictures move people
Viewers tend to react to these portraits more strongly than to ordinary street photographs, and there are a few reasons why.
- Touch is a signal of trust. In everyday life we touch only people we know well, so a portrait of two people touching reads instantly as a portrait of a bond.
- Difference makes the closeness visible. When the people in a frame clearly come from different generations or walks of life, the viewer notices the gap that the gesture is bridging.
- The truth is half staged, half real. The pose is arranged, but the willingness to take part is genuine, and so is the brief moment of shared vulnerability.
A photograph does not turn strangers into friends. What the project shows is narrower and perhaps more useful: that the line between "us" and "them" is thinner than it looks, and that a small act of openness costs very little.
A small takeaway
You do not need an 8x10 camera to test the idea. Saying hello to a neighbour you have only nodded at, or sitting next to someone new, is a modest version of the same experiment. Most people, as these portraits suggest, are more willing to meet halfway than we assume.
Sources: Wikipedia: Richard Renaldi, SFO Museum: Richard Renaldi, Touching Strangers, CBS News On the Road with Steve Hartman (2013, via YouTube), Richard Renaldi's website.
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