Purdue will feature Richard Renaldi's 'Touching Strangers' exhibit
January 12, 2015
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Richard Renaldi's "Touching Strangers" photographs will be on exhibit through Feb. 6 at Purdue University's Patti and Rusty Rueff School of Visual and Performing Arts.
The exhibit, located at the Patti and Rusty Rueff Galleries: East, will feature 20 portraits from the "Touching Strangers" series by Renaldi that involves approaching and asking strangers to physically interact while posing together for a portrait. Since 2007, Renaldi has been working with a large format eight-by-ten-inch view camera in towns and cities all over the United States.
Rueff Galleries, located in Yue-Kong Pao Hall, 552 W. Wood St., West Lafayette, are open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, and until 7 p.m. on Thursdays. The exhibits are free and open to the public. Schedule updates and more information about the galleries are available online. This exhibit opened Monday (Jan. 12).
"I'm so pleased that we are able to bring this exhibition to Purdue's campus," said Liz Erlewine, Rueff Galleries gallery coordinator and exhibition curator. "Full of beauty and tension, Renaldi's posed photographs of two strangers reveal the complexity of human interaction across social divides. What I find perhaps most powerful in this series is the instinctual act of the viewer to create a narrative for the subjects, even when these stories are obviously just a fiction devised by the viewer's perceived identity of the individuals in the images. Through this series, Renaldi raises significant questions about humanity, respect, love, understanding, fear and trust."
Renaldi was born in Chicago in 1968. He received his bachelor's degree 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," was released by the Aperture Foundation in the spring of 2014.
Writer: Amy Patterson Neubert, 765-494-9723, apatterson@purdue.edu
Sources: Douglas Summers, Richard Renaldi's studio assistant, studio@renaldi.com
Liz Erlewine, eerlewin@purdue.edu, 765-496-2958
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