Essay from the catalog:  Western Lives   Richard Renaldi  Nicolaysen Art Museum and Discovery Center   Fall 2007

American culture has become singularly obsessed by the lurid spectacle surrounding the banal mechanics of everyday life. Through endless reality-based television, behind-the-scenes exposés on the inner torments and tantrums of notorious celebrities, there seems to be a boundless need to be filled in looking at the foibles and differences of others while comparing them to ourselves and our daily, predictable routines. What should be private is played out in public in a continuous visual loop. Much of this culture glut is an obvious overload of images needing to processed, sorted, and forgotten. Who has time to look at others, to really look, when surface and quick judgments of people are all that matters in such a world? Difference, whether cultural, racial, or political, is cause for extreme divisiveness rather than the opposite of looking for common ground in order to bridge perceived gaps. In the end, it is quite quaint and homespun in its simplicity--we really are all human underneath and worth stopping to gaze at to really see and acknowledge. Maybe there is a story there, something outside our narrow realm of experience that will cause us to open up and stretch our boundaries to possibly connect with another. Beyond that, what is there that is most precious and worth striving for?

The mesmerizing photographic portraits of Richard Renaldi do indeed stop us in our tracks as they force us to see beyond the outwardly mundane scrim of yet another anonymous persona to something more poignant, strong, fierce, unique, and human underneath.   Renaldi, like many photographers before him (Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand, Stephen Shore), has made that very American trek across the country, constantly photographing its populace and exploring their physical and spiritual ties to culture, land, home, geography, and place.   His recent photographs of well-heeled Madison Avenue pedestrians and peoples living in the West and Great Plains are imbued by the individual, their unique quirks and qualities that tend to blossom and transfix us under his lens.   Whether it is a small boy dressed in the full, weighty, grubby padding of a football uniform or a waitress brandishing her mop like a lance and armored in a decorative padded apron, we experience the full force of their common, shared humanity in grinding out a life where things do not come easy. This artist is less interested in the mechanics and dynamics of the group. He tends to focus on the solitary individual or twosome, captured in their well-worn everyday environments. His photographs speak equally in revealing personal and archetypal vulnerabilities and strengths, as well as evoking a vast sense of place that, like his subjects, is both infinite, extraordinarily fascinating, prosaic, and daunting to grasp.

The exhibition "Richard Renaldi: Western Lives," is a combination of three different photographic projects from 2004-2006: The Great Plains, Bus Travelers, and Navajo Nation. The impetus and spark behind all three is the same in that Renaldi photographs people of all ages and walks of life through a vast stretch of the country that is probably considered off the radar in terms of the urban centers on each coast. He also tends to focus somewhat on closed communities, as least in the temporary--the random gatherings of disparate folks in bus terminals, residents of small towns in the middle of the Great Plains or the various peoples comprising the Navajo Nation of Arizona. Renaldi's forthright presentation of his subjects, mostly centered within the image and straight forwardly facing the camera, telegraph a certain confidence in who they are, how they present themselves to the world, and what their expectations are from this particular weighted interaction. For the most part, the personae of these three series are embedded in the locales and vast stretches of the country that are as forgettable, numbing, and anonymous to some as they are beautiful, extraordinary, stark, and gorgeous to others.

Renaldi encapsulates and offers a most precious intimacy with his sub jects. They reveal themselves to him and to us in the fraught interaction that photography creates between subject, artist, and viewer. This relationship combines a certain voyeurism on the part of the viewer with the anonymity and intense intimacy between subject and artist that exists for a short-lived moment.   There is no attempt on the part of the artist or subject to implicitly dramatize or heroicize their situation, even though the images are staged and planned with full participation on both sides. They do not look as such, which makes all the difference. The process by which Renaldi creates this work is more cumbersome and time-consuming than the images implicitly convey. The photographs are composed to look like the subjects were just happened upon and snapped in an instant. The 8   x 10 Wisner camera that Renaldi sets up with the tripod is cumbersome and oversized, with the entire process and interaction sometimes taking up to ten minutes to complete. His subjects must be willing to then play an equal and lengthy part in this charged act of communication and reciprocity.                    

Renaldi juxtaposes these studied, thoughtful portraits within a setting that is not just a backdrop, but an extension of the person. In a sense, this equates these people in their expressive vulnerability and frank presentation with the anxious feeling arising from an encounter with an overpowering, sublime, endless expanse of nature that cannot be fully known or grasped. In capturing the gravity and interior qualities of his subjects, while persuading his sitters to present themselves as they are, both artist and subject transcend the moment and medium. This turns the interaction into an endless foray into memory, narrative, adventure, fantasy, and emotion. There is no theatricality or grandstanding in Renaldi's portraits. His su jects are more often than not, serious and contemplative, transmitting the fact that this interaction is worth the time and gravity of purpose. What you see is what you see. Except not. Whether it is the stillness, focus, questioning, resolve, or curiosity in these people, Renaldi's portraits unfurl and draw us into their depths, while becoming much more than the sum of their surface attraction, color, depth, texture, and composition.

What is more exciting than discovering and exploring the depths of another, at least in the beginning? Yes, we can navigate through recognizable traits and emotions as we are very familiar with the landmarks, as they are us. It is also the deep unknowing within that familiarity that is so resolutely compelling. A mystery resides below the surface of these people, one that gets lost and buried in daily life, as ritualized tasks and the theatrics and rhythm of the everyday take over.   What is ultimately so hypnotic about these jewel-like, iconic, and charismatic portraits is that, as viewers, we can glimpse the moment that people are opening themselves up to trust another in a setting that would normally be replete with anonymity, boundaries, and the respectful and welcome distance of strangers.     

No other medium retains this kind of transfixing power to meld descriptive reality with personal fantasy and supposition. It is uniquely photography that rides this edge between a clarified reality and a mysterious fiction as "a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye." 1   It is almost like there are simultaneous different dimensions of the self all layered underneath and beyond one beautifully composed and colored image. It is truly a looking glass effect, as the collaboration between artist and subject has modified and transmogrified what we know of as real life into something both recognizable and beyond the known and seen. It can now be filled with any narrative thread from pathos, to mystery, tedium, boredom, magic, and endless possibility.   Thinking back to the early beginnings of photography when it was invented in 1839, the fact that some thought that it stole the souls of its subjects might not be too far off the mark when its full power is harnessed and put forth. Some essential part of these people are now out in the public realm, working on us as we gaze back at them. We think that we know and can connect with them, as well as see something of ourselves in them, when it is really only solvents and paper mixing in an alchemical combination. What indeed are we looking at and interacting with on such a deep, personal level when confronted with these people and images?

Each medium of art is intrinsically tied to its nature and it is the nature of photography to depict--in glorious detail, what we can and cannot see, right in front of our eyes. The notion of photography as an unbiased recorder of fact and reality has been totally stripped away, but there is still the rote reality of its mechanical process that interacts with the motives of artist, subject, and viewer. Since its inception in the early 19th century, photography has strived to be taken seriously as a fine art form. The fact that it was not of the hand and was considered a very democratic medium made acceptance a long, hard battle. Painting, with its sensual surface, cult of the genius artist with the oversized ego and personality went hand in hand with established painterly pictoral conventions that influenced and hamstrung photography from the beginning. Chief among this was the tableau, "that independently beautiful depiction and composition that derives from the institutionalization of perspective and dramatic figuration...it is known as a product of divine gift, high skill, deep emotion, and crafty planning." 2   In its infancy, photography could only present its surface as what it was. It had no gooey, thick substance to play around with, so a reliance on painterly conventions to compose the picture only went so far. Photography, though could play its own tricks with the surface utilizing the "close-up, blow-up, depth of field, precision of detail [to open up] spaces that previously existed in dreams...but had certainly never been consciously seen, let alone re produced." 3  It could take reality, such as it was, and make it more so.

Renaldi's portraits are not objective studies on the sociology of place or a rigid categorization of a certain subculture. They are highly subjec tive and suggestive realms of personality imbued by their rather stark surroundings. There is a surprising candor about these portraits as these strangers, enticed by the photographer, have opened up their lives to us for all sorts of judgments and emotions: visual aesthetic pleasure, derision, boredom, fascination, and quite possibly feeling nothing at all. The tension and persuasive quality of the images rewards repeat exploring and arises from being both timeless and of the moment simultaneously .

The performative aspect of portraiture is especially compelling in Renaldi's body of work as it is so subtle and below the radar of the viewer.   How much control do his subjects ultimately have in crafting their impression--they are not professionals, primping and pouting for an adoring camera. They are like us, going about mundane routines when someone stops to take a brief interest in their life. How do you prepare for that moment? Renaldi's eye and camera captures the infinitesimal gestures and unconscious body language that transmits so much with so little. A balled or clenched fist, cocked tilt of the head, or steely gaze all resonate on many levels. It is interesting to note that the more these portraits are looked at, the more that the clothing on Renaldi's subjects tends to morph into costume or armor, masking what the face and body betray through the intense shared intimacy. Mass culture has us running around like maniacs all the time, trying and buying things to be people that we feel we are entitled to be in the ultimate search for the self. All the choice aspects of culture: clothing, food, and music funnel us into a certain subsection and there we stay, striving to be unique within these anonymous materials and tools. Through the simple act of being aware, as well as the posing, looking, composition, and steady focus, Renaldi strips all this boring sameness away to reveal not longing, theatre, playacting or wish-fulfillment, but centered souls saying this is how it is with me and inviting us to look and connect on a deeper, more profound level with each other.

Lisa Hatchadoorian

1 Benjamin, Walter, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations : trans. Harry Zohn (New York: 1969), 236-37: qouted in Holger Liebs, "The Same Returns The Tradition of Documentary Photogra phy," in Veronica's Revenge Contemporary Perspectives on Photography, ed. Elizabeth Janus (New York: Scalo, 1998), 102.

2 Jeff Wall, "Marks of Indifference: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art," in Veronica's Revenge Contempo rary Perspectives on Photography , ed. Elizabeth Janus (New York: Scalo, 1998), 75.

3 Holger Liebs," The Same Returns The Tradition of Documentary Photography," in Veronica's Revenge Contemporary Perspectives on Photography, ed. Elizabeth Janus, (New York, Scalo, 1998), 102.

Essay from   Richard Renaldi: Figure and Ground  Aperture Fall 2006

Now and again American photographers journey across America. They load their film, fire up their imagination and get in their cars, heading from East to West. These extended trips invariably   begin in New York. It's as if there is an almost instinctive need to retread the path of westward expansion,   to find out what's out there and in the process discover something of themselves. Continental America has come to be defined by the images of film, television and photography and in American photography the journey has emerged as the abiding and defining motif, handed down like a baton charge across time, through the hands of Walker Evans, Robert Frank and Stephen Shore. Those stopping off places that punctuate the open road, the dinner, the motel,   the gas and bus stations have through re-visitation and repetition become the recurring emblems of American photography, just as   the expressionless gaze and the forensic description of the industrial landscape have come to define German practice.  

Those of us devoted to photography   are just beginning to appreciate   how this most universally democratic of mediums has taken root and flourished in different countries in often subtly different ways. The history of photography in Iran or South Africa   is appreciably different from the parallel development of photography in Australia or Turkey. Each of these histories reveal something of the culture of their host nations and throw into relief the more well told tales of photography in America and Europe. As ideas and practices are more freely exchanged in an ever more inter connected world it is sobering to realise the persistence of dominant   regional themes.

The slowed down quiet contemplation of the faces of strangers has offered   American photography a secondary and binary theme and with it the perfect antidote to the appetite for accelerated travel. It is revealing that despite America's mythical love for all that is new and innovative the Daguerreotype portrait lingered on in America in the 1850s long after it had died out in Europe. At its peak 10,000 operators were producing some three million daguerreotypes a year. It even spawned its own town, Duguerreville on the banks of the Hudson. It is as if this tilting game play between light and dark, positive and negative, public and private taped into the deepest roots of the American psyche.

Richard Renaldi is the most recent photographer to add to the American photographic continuum, looking over his shoulder to what has come up from behind, carrying it forward and handing it on.   Figure and Ground , the first published collection of Renaldi's work was not conceived as a conventional road trip. Rather it is a drawing together of a series of separate portrait projects plotted in New York, New Jersey, Arizona, Texas and California that have been expanded and encouraged to drift freely across a continent. Growing from out of his interest in street portraiture with its concerns for background and placement his eye has turned towards the surrounding landscapes and   his camera has   been tilted to its side to absorb the connecting vistas.

There is of course nothing accidental or incidental in his work. He employs a large, cumbersome, Wisner 10x 8 camera hauled up onto a tripod and rooted to the ground. Each picture is the product of a series of deliberate choices and established rituals. An idea is conceived, a location scouted and negotiated, a potential sitter spied, cast and engaged and a photograph made. The resulting images, crafted in a darkroom,   have the contemporary appeal of descriptive detail and saturated colour and yet the process of their making is gloriously anachronistic, redolent of the painstaking rigmarole of photography in the nineteenth century. Images are cranked into focus on the ground glass screen under a black hood.   A dark slide is inserted, adjustments made, ratchets tweaked   and finally a negative exposed. Many of Renaldi's subjects are either taking a break from the tedium of mundane but necessary jobs or are waiting in the pauses between interminable and numbing, long distance bus rides.   The unexpected attention of an attentative photographer performing mysterious and quixotic tasks with a hunk of equipment that looks as if has been hauled from out of   the local   museum must, in itself,   have been a welcome distraction.

Too often photographers strategically exploit   large cameras to intimidate or provoke their sitters into masks of startled anxiety. Renaldi resists the trick and has a gentler more kindly approach.   Each of his subjects are encouraged to work with him in the collaborative act of making portraits, albeit for the duration of what is,   in reality, a singularly brief encounter. Look   into the faces of his subjects and it's hard to detect any noticeable flickers of mistrust or frowns of misunderstanding. Rather than being backed into a tight spot by the camera these sitters are given the time and space to unfurl before an enquiring lens into compositions of studied dignity. For sure, Renaldi is attracted to certain people and approaches them in the same eager spirit of a fashion editor street casting for just the right look. But there is something rather revealing in his choices and his apparent rejection of the more obvious exotic extremes of caricature. The people he choices and the prints he has chosen to present are more appealingly ambiguous and resistant to quick and easy judgment.

Appearances often deceive and Renaldi seems particularly drawn to people who care greatly about their appearance. What should we make of Sabrina, the peroxide blond clutching her luggage and her bus ticket in Philadelphia on the last stage of a 3,000 mile ride from Los Angeles to New York? You can't help but admire the preservation of her carefully manicured style tended in bus station bathrooms along the way and note the irony of her journeying against the grain of Renaldi's book. And what of Susan impeccably dressed in fur lined black, basking in the sunlight of Upper East Side Madison Avenue? Her gaze defies any easy inscription of her as a mere monied shopper. There is an equal determination there and a flash of a life beneath the veneer. The two women, a generation apart, seem kindred spirits at either end of their respective journeys.

The portrait of Cummings in the tattoo parlour in Twentynine Palms California is more quietly troubling. We are presented with   someone in the process of altering his appearance and assuming a new   identity. The picture prickles to the vibrating electric hum of clippers and needles making deliberate   play between cherubic beauty and brutality and evoking   the spirit of August Sander's 1945 portrait of a young soldier standing in a Westerwald farmyard is his storm trooper's helmet and freshly issued uniform. Sander's soldier looks every inch the dressed up farm boy and the chill of the picture, as with Renaldi's portrait of Cummings, is not who he is but what he might become.

Renaldi is fascinated by the presentation of youthful masculinity particularly at that transitional moment of change when appearances are altered and new identities assumed. In an earlier age, when portrait photographs were made in studios, people dressed to be photographed.   It was an occasion to present the new you to the camera and through the photograph distribute the altered self amongst old friends. Renaldi's portrait made in Fresno 2003 of the four Hmong cousins, Dy, Thai, Sokha and Lay, uniformly dressed in improbably dazzling whites has these same qualities. The canopy of trees overhanging the receding suburban sidewalk creates the appropriate mises-en-scène of hand painted studio backdrops. Renaldi had spotted the group on the stoop of a house and persuaded them out onto the street. During the exchange it emerged that the purpose for the cousins coming together and the reason for their choice of whites was that they had returned, that afternoon, from a pre-arranged session at a neighbourhood portrait studio. Their appearance then really was for the camera, although not initially Richard Renaldi's camera. The cousins were conforming to the still common Asian practice of formal family portraits to be shared out among the wider family group. This second portrait of the day completes the circle providing a chance meeting of two parallel photographic cultures and bringing the contemporary photographer neatly and smartly back to photography's nineteenth century roots.  

Figure and Ground has evolved from a series of distinctive projects and has been expanded and completed into an exquisitely edited narrative of what we now knowingly refer to as the Photo book. Most of the buyers of the book will have bought other books and the title will be added to small and large private and public libraries. In its first days the readers will turn the pages and the picture will suggest other pictures, the book other books. We will look again at Stephen Shore's Uncommon Places, at Richard Avedon's American West,   at August Sander's Citizens of the Twentieth Century and nourished by these new images will see the older ones through refreshened eyes.  

This is a fixed and permanent document; the newest link in a chain that permanently binds America to the photographic. In ten and twenty years time the photographs will loose their contemporary feel. When the book is pulled once again from the shelf the acutely observed Newark shop signage advertising the buying and selling of Playstation games, the Stetson hat company domain name on a sweatshirt, the tribal costumes of the Upper East Side will appear as faint echoes from a bygone age.   We will instinctively measure our image of America against the time of the photographs, what we think America had become when the pictures were taken and what we think it has become since.

Roger Hargreaves

Essay from   Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video   Fall 2003

Richard Renaldi has photographed the inhabitants of New York City since 1993, when he began shooting pictures of the area surrounding the Christopher Street piers in Greenwich Village. That project was completed just prior to a massive redevelopment of the Hudson River waterfront, which eradicated many of the traditional hangouts and meeting places of this predominantly gay and lesbian neighborhood.

After his village project was completed, Renaldi turned his lens uptown and embarked on a series of photographs documenting the pedestrians on a short stretch of Madison Avenue in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Renaldi’s “Madison Avenue” pictures focus on the individual men and women who agreed to pose for impromptu portraits. Each subject is isolated and portrayed standing on the sidewalk in the bright afternoon sun against a backdrop of storefronts and shop windows. Despite the great variety of individuals selected, it is clear that Renaldi is drawn to people who carry the markers of wealth and socioeconomic status. Invariably his subjects are dressed in smart suits, wrapped in voluminous furs, or laden with shopping bags from high-end Madison Avenue boutiques. Resisting a crude typology of class however, Renaldi complicates his view by introducing a more subtle suggestion about the economy of leisure. The fact that the pictures are so deliberate—they are shot with an 8 x 10 view camera—makes clear that they require more than a momentary pause from the agreeable passersby. These are, then, a particular subclass of shoppers, the unhurried pedestrians, those that can afford the time to stroll casually along the avenue and stop to indulge a photographer. By capturing his extravagant subjects in this informal context, Renaldi underscores the remarkable performance aspect of class signification. His portraits never stoop to shrill critique, but they ironically contrast the leisurely act of strolling the avenue with a strangely laborious form of public self-presentation.

MGN