Philadelphia Weekly    April 27, 2010

Richard Renaldi captivates with black-and-white photos of people on the edges of society.

By Roberta Fallon

The first thing you notice about the subjects of “Fall River Boys” is how vulnerable they seem. The young men of Fall River, Mass., depicted in Richard Renaldi’s black-and-white photos at Sol Mednick Gallery as part of this week’s Equality Forum, might be neighborhood thugs. But Thomas, Trevor, Kevin, Craig and the rest—with their baggy pants, bandanas, piercings and cigarettes—bare their souls for Renaldi and pose with no semblance of attitude or pretense.

Renaldi is an extraordinary street photographer. In a field known for speedy encounters, he embraces the slow-cooked approach, using an old-fashioned mahogany viewfinder. He prefers pricey 8-by-10 negatives (black and white at $4-$5 each; color at $8.50-$9 each) and the long exposure they require—and the exquisite detail they produce. With the camera on a tripod and a black cloth over his head to keep the light out, Renaldi at work in 2010 is a flash from the past, a 19th-century anomaly. At a time when almost everybody has a camera phone, Renaldi’s old-fashioned setup capitalizes on the lure of the dimly imagined past.

PW spoke with the artist last week about his unusually in-depth portraits and methods. The New York University photography grad is imbued with brazenness from his mother, who apparently would routinely approach total strangers and “talk their ear off.”

Young people today might be more likely to flip you the finger than let you take their picture. So how does Renaldi get them to pose for him? And how does he bond with them so that they let their guard down and unmask themselves so completely? “It’s a question photographers ask me all the time … how do you do it? It’s a great mystery,” he says.

Renaldi introduces himself to his subjects as a photographer working on a project. He sometimes brings one of his published books to show them and promises to send a print. Hopefully, this is enough to prove his intentions.

But even if they could convince the subjects to participate, not every photographer could get these soulful shots. Something about Renaldi’s geeky friendliness and his all-too-human fear of being rejected makes an empathetic connection between the subject and artist.

“Of course, I’m a little anxious. It’s like asking someone on a date,” he says, adding that he’s also anxious about setting up the shot, something he fusses with under the blanket to get right.

Renaldi’s works are political. He’s not photographing the nouveau riche or old-moneyed Main Liners. He seeks out those at the edges of society. Previous work mined the bus stations and rural byways of America and gay meeting places in New York. The “Fall River Boys,” citizens of a once-prosperous, now post-industrial city, celebrate these dead-end kids, who are icons of the downwardly mobile. Some of the most poignant “Fall River” shots involve two friends leaning on each other. In shots like these, body language turns metaphorical and touch is exquisitely felt. Jonathan leaning on the small but solid William, for example, is both literal and metaphorical as friends who need each other. Trevor’s awkwardly placed arm over small Thomas’ shoulder, likewise, connotes the sheltering support one has for the other.

“Touching Strangers” is Renaldi’s newest project, one that brings strangers together to touch each other (everything from hands touching arms to all-out bear hugs) before the artist’s camera. He’s photographed all over the country and what’s captured by that project, as in the “Fall River” photos, is the artist’s warm embrace of humanity.

The Boston Globe   May 14, 2009

Tracing transitions via young men of Fall River

By Mark Feeney

Fall River, for many people, is the sort of place you leave, while Cape Cod is the sort of place you go to.

A decade ago, Richard Renaldi had the reverse experience.

"I got to know Fall River because I live in New York and started vacationing on the Cape," Renaldi recalled earlier this month. He was at Bernard Toale Projects, in the South End, prior to a book-signing for his photo collection "Fall River Boys."

"You have to drive over the Braga Bridge, right through Fall River. It just really appealed to me: this working-class, New England look - the beautiful old textile mills, which are really stunning. So I was drawn to that. I wanted to explore. One day on the way back from the Cape I brought my view camera and film."

"Fall River Boys" is the product of that exploration. The book consists of 89 black-and-white photographs Renaldi took over the past decade during trips to the gritty Southeastern Massachusetts city of 90,000. A few of the images are cityscapes. The lion's share are portraits of teenagers. Most of them, as the title suggests, are male. All the images express a powerful sense of place.

"I feel a strong affection for the town," Renaldi said of Fall River. With his extensive tattoos and chiseled physique, he might pass for an older version of one of his subjects. Yet even though he looks a decade younger than his age, 41, Renaldi is no boy. And as someone who's worked as a photo editor at Magnum, the celebrated photo agency, and traveled on photographic projects throughout the United States, his world extends far beyond the banks of the Taunton River. "Essentially, I'm still an outsider," Renaldi said.

The book, which came out in March, was scheduled to receive its semi-official local unveiling at a reception for Renaldi at the Fall River Historical Society yesterday. "It'll be interesting to see," Michael Martins, the society's curator, said last week of residents' response to the book.

"Richard is a visionary," Martins said in a telephone interview. "He captured something no one else has. He's captured these characters just at the brink, no longer boys, but not quite men."

In some respects, Martins said, Renaldi's work in "Fall River Boys" recalls the work of another photographer who documented youth in the city. "A century ago, Lewis Hine did photographs of child workers in the textile mills here, and Richard's work bears comparison to those."

It seems almost fated that Renaldi would photograph Fall River. His website,www.renaldi.com, offers examples from an impressively diverse range of subjects: surfers, bodybuilders, gay and lesbian seniors, New York's Madison Avenue, bus passengers. Renaldi also has a recurring interest in downtrodden locales: Newark, Fresno, Calif., failing towns on the Great Plains.

"There's something very tactile, visually, about these places," Renaldi said. "I'm drawn to Main Street America, rather than strip-mall America. And Fall River is interesting because it's unique but also could stand in for a lot of New England towns. People look at these pictures and they say this reminds them of Providence or Lowell.

"There's a definite sociological component to my work," Renaldi added, "but it's not hit-you-over-the-head. It's a little more subtle. I've always been interested in ideas of class and, well, what's happening in America."

Lisa Hatchadoorian, who curated Renaldi's 2007 exhibition, "Western Lives," at the Nicolaysen Art Museum, in Casper, Wyo., said in an e-mail last week that she sees "an archetypal quality" in the photographer's work, which "makes the photos (and people) so poignant and unforgettable."

Renaldi's portraiture, Hatchadoorian said, "seems to be as much about place as it is about the person - even if the place is generic, anonymous, and blurry in the photo. . . . His subjects seem so tied to their environment."

"Figure and Ground," Renaldi's first book, was published three years ago by Aperture. Now he's his own publisher. Renaldi and his partner, Seth Boyd, are owners of Charles Lane Press (named after the street they live on in Greenwich Village). "Fall River Boys" is the press' first book.

"It's really fun making it," Renaldi said of producing a book. "And it's really hard selling it. . . . We're trying to distinguish ourselves as a niche press that does small press runs - one book a year, for now - and that works with the best printers. People do care about that, but right now it's tough, because of the economy."

Renaldi grew up in the Chicago area and studied photography at New York University. His discovery of the medium came in high school. "It was like the first thing I did that I was actually good at it," Renaldi recalled. "I picked up the camera and started making pictures and I liked it. I think in high school when you find something you do well it gives you confidence. It's such a vulnerable time."

Renaldi can see that vulnerability in his "Fall River Boys" subjects. It's one of the things that moved him to photograph them.

"I think it's very interesting coming of age as a young man in a town that's somewhat limited in opportunities, and telling that story," Renaldi said. "Also it's this awkward time in your life when you're growing into your new body. That also applies to females, but it happens at a younger age; and girls in their teens are very, very hard to photograph. They're quite distrustful, understandably, and extremely giggly. Boys somehow have a little more seriousness; you can approach them that way.

"I photograph women in all my other work, and a few in Fall River, but I did want to focus on young men for those reasons. And it's interesting to me that your body is in this adolescent phase for only a short time. Then you grow into a full person, and that's it - until, of course, you shrink, 50 years later! So it's an interesting time. And there's impressionability: I think males are more open at that age."

The sense of connection between Renaldi and his subjects in "Fall River Boys" is palpable. Does he consider them collaborators?

"Definitely I see them as collaborators, definitely," he said. "They're giving me part of themselves: their time, their image."

Each collaboration starts the same way: with a straightforward request.

"It's always the way I shoot everything," Renaldi said. "I just approach people and stop them on the street. It comes naturally to me. It's my mom. She's a talker. . . . Sometimes it's difficult. But if someone says no it's no big deal. A lot of people are afraid of rejection or crossing some social boundary. You just have to realize people are generally nice.

"I will bring a copy of the book or whatever I'm working on and explain what I'm doing. Then they see the camera and go, 'Holy [expletive],' [because] that's something from another planet."

Photo District News   January 2007

Angels in America

By Kristina Feliciano

If first impressions are the most important ones, then Richard Renaldi can count himself truly fortunate. Aperture has just published a 156-page monograph of his work, Figure and Ground , that is as stunning a showcase and an introduction as any photographer could hope for.

The book is presented as a journey across the country, from east to west, that encompasses seven years' worth of portraits and landscapes, all of them taken with a Wisner 8 x 10 view camera. The pages are populated by all kinds of people: athletes, bus travelers, businesspeople, lesbians, punk kids, a hunter, a 19-year-old cowboy-hat salesman (who started up a conversation with Renaldi on Richard Avedon). Some of them clearly have money, while others are of the Nickel and Dimed demographic.

In most cases, his subjects are alone in the frame, a compositional decision that can spark a sense of wistfulness or isolation--starting with the cover, which features a young woman named Christine, of Fresno, California, dressed in fashionable black and carrying a purse that reads "New York." She's holding a rose and looking uncertainly over her shoulder at us. People have asked the New York City-based shooter if his intention is to be wistful or sad, but he tells them he simply wants the focus to be on the one person; he wants us to see what he sees. "They're all beautiful, and there's something unique about them," he says of his subjects.

Renaldi, who was included in the inaugural ICP Triennial, in 2003, and whose work will be exhibited at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York at the end of January, says he shoots who he is drawn to. That evidently means he's drawn to a person's humanity, and having found it, he renders portraits that are appreciative without being heroic. "I think [his portraits] are incredibly subtle and restrained in a lot of ways," says Lesley Martin, his editor at Aperture.

Because of Renaldi's choice of equipment--the 8 x 10 calls for patience on the part of both photographer and sitter--his subjects are nearly as contemplative about doing the portrait as he is, and it shows in their face. "There's a formalness to being photographed with the view camera," he notes.

The consciousness of their participation is matched by Renaldi's specifically selected environments, which contain striking colors: the acid-yellow wall that sets off the tawny skin and red shirt of Jaime in Denver; the red painted seat that picks up the cherry-colored lipstick worn by Latasha in Wichita Falls, Texas; the wide black-and-white stripes behind Andre in Newark, New Jersey. Renaldi usually "casts" his subject first, and then together they go in search of a location, which can entail walking around the corner or taking a short drive.

Renaldi, who is 38, has been shooting since the '80s. He studied photography at NYU and has worked at Magnum and as a photo researcher. His first attempt at a photo project was in 1997, when he decided to document the scene at Pier 45 in the West Village, a Hudson River hangout for gay men. "I learned the discipline of going to a place over and over again," he recalls.

The next year, Renaldi decided to try freelancing and has since made his living as a photographer, mostly shooting editorial, including for Harper's Bazaar , Los Angeles Magazine , and Jane . And it looks like Figure and Ground might expand his commercial horizons; since the book was published, he's had calls from Modern Painters and Art and Auction .

1998 was also the year Renaldi began shooting with an 8 x 10; his first series centered on Manhattan's posh Madison Avenue. Then--inspired by the work of large-format photographers such as August Sander and his "People of the Twentieth Century" project--he did a series on blue-collar workers and has since produced such projects as including "Fresno," "Bus Travellers," "Newark," "L.A. Street," and "Great Plains."

Notably, the photos in Figure and Ground were not made with a trans-America motif in mind; Renaldi's initial goal was to publish a book on "Fall River Boys," a black-and-white essay centering on an economically depressed Massachusetts town. He first sent the photos to a friend of a friend at DAP, who thought it could work for Aperture and passed it on to Martin. Renaldi's name was familiar to Martin; she had included his work in a 2002 traveling exhibition called "Pandemic: Facing AIDS." She reviewed his other photos (Renaldi enthusiastically maintains a thorough website, www.renaldi.com, that includes all of his projects) and, along with her colleagues, concluded that Aperture should publish a book of his work.

"I was impressed by the scope of the material and the way in which he's able to bring these people into a very unique type of encounter with the viewer," says Martin. "It was just a sense here [at Aperture] that this was something that may not be the most cutting-edge, avant-garde body of work but that it really is genuine and touching."

But she was not of the opinion that "Fall River Boys" should be how Richard Renaldi would be introduced to the world at large. Instead, his first step needed to be a wider-ranging, semi-career-spanning volume. "I think his color palette is luminous and beautiful, and I thought that would be the best way to open a door," explains Martin, who also suggested including some of his landscapes to convey "a sense of motion."

Accustomed to thinking of his projects as discrete entities, Renaldi initially resisted the idea of breaking them up and combining them. "It took a little bit of letting go of that and letting my ego be put aside," he says.

One thing that both Renaldi and Martin readily agreed on: Narrowing down the images from so many bodies of work--there were 26 posted at his site at last count--was difficult. "But this was really supposed to be a thumbnail sketch, an overview of the best," notes Martin. "There's still a lot more to come out of each series."

Pride   June 2004

Old Wine In New Skins

By Lawrence Schubert

If photographer Richard Renaldi 's body of work had a title it might be How to Achieve Naturalism in a Photo-Sensitive Age . Labeled a humanist by his supporters, Renaldi's detractors are more difficult to locate, his portraiture occupying an irony-free zone in marked contrast to the hyperventilating tendencies characteristic of contemporary fashion and celebrity representation. With a BFA in photography from New York University, Renaldi keeps a studio in downtown Los Angeles's historic Orpheum Theatre building on Broadway. HIV-positive since 1996, the photographer has devoted a sizable portion of his portfolio to putting a living, human face on those afflicted with the AIDS as well as its long-term survivors. If there is a special poignancy to this portfolio, it is because the photographer has been so resolutely clear-eyed in his depictions, striving for neither pity nor victimization, only inclusion. Renaldi had his first one-man exhibition, the critically acclaimed Fresno/Newark , last December at Manhattan's Debs & Co. gallery in Chelsea. He was included in Strangers , the International Center for Photography's first triennial, and has an upcoming solo exhibition at L.A.'s Western Project.