Richard Renaldi and Carly Cram

Friday, September 19th, 2014 7:30 PM PST
San Francisco Art Institute Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut St, San Francisco, CA 94133

This event is presented in partnership with the San Francisco Art Institute

About Richard Renaldi:

Richard Renaldi was born in Chicago in 1968. He received his BFA in photography from New York University in 1990. Exhibitions of his photographs have been mounted in galleries and museums throughout the United States, Asia, and Europe. In 2006 Renaldi's first monograph, Figure and Ground, was published by the Aperture Foundation. His second monograph, Fall River Boys, was released in 2009 by Charles Lane Press. Renaldi's most recent monograph Touching Strangers, is available through  Aperture.

Touching Strangers

Since 2007, Richard Renaldi has been working on a series of photographs that involve approaching and asking complete strangers to physically interact while posing together for a portrait. Working on the street with a large format 8-by-10-inch view camera, Renaldi encounters the subjects for his photographs in towns and cities all over the United States. He pairs them up and invites them to pose together, intimately, in ways that people are usually taught to reserve for their close friends and loved ones.

Renaldi creates spontaneous and fleeting relationships between strangers for the camera, often pushing his subjects beyond their comfort levels. These relationships may only last for the moment the shutter is released, but the resulting photographs are moving and provocative, and raise profound questions about the possibilities for positive human connection in a diverse society. © aperture

Manhattan, Sunday

“The city takes a while to wake up, and the first people you see at the break of day are the night-clubbers, street cleaners, and prostitutes,” Richard Renaldi told me recently. We were talking about his current project, “Manhattan Sunday,” a series of early-morning photographs that he has been shooting since 2010. Renaldi, a former night-clubber who has lived in New York since 1986, said that he wanted to capture the way the city feels after staying out all night. He photographed the empty streets just before sunrise, as the city came to life. “Sunday morning is a magical and inspiring time,” he said. “It’s a break in the chaotic swirl. People are quiet, reflective, coming down, and peacefully tired. They are in the same space as the city.” Renaldi began taking pictures of people as they left after-hours clubs—Pacha, District 36, Roseland—and the all-night karaoke bars on Thirty-second Street. “I wanted this to be a celebration of the characters I’ve seen, who get dressed up and put their freak on to go out on a Saturday night. So often this is hidden in the dark,” Renaldi said. “These photographs open that up and really show the creativity and attention that is put into how these clubbers are presenting themselves.” © The New Yorker

Fall River Boys

“This whole town is lifeless/been that way all our whole lives just/work at the mill until you die/work at the mill and then you die.”

“Undisciplined” is an apt description for most of the portrait subjects in this book. There’s a certain insouciance evident on the faces – and particularly in the body language – of the young men here, even as we viewers suspect that their blithe lack of concern will soon turn to disappointment. Tattoos and pierces (of the sort that keep one from respectable employment) abound, as do scars that appear hard-won. Whether Black, Hispanic, or white, the boys generally adopt a baggy hip-hop style – a sort of conformity played as rebellion. © fractionmag.com

About Carly Cram:

Carly Cram grew up outside of Los Angeles where she studied sculptural ceramics before choosing to focus on photography, and in 2014 she received her BFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been featured in literary journals and magazines both in print and online, in several gallery exhibitions, and her images for the Arts of Fashion Foundation appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. She currently works and resides in San Francisco.