Richard Renaldi is a photographer in love with looking. He searches for the brief encounter, that fleeting moment when a stranger opens his life to him and, consequently, to the viewer. His trust in the descriptive and empathic ability of the camera verges on that of his nineteenth- and early twentieth-century predecessors. Can we gain insight into the person in front of us simply by staring fixedly into his face, by capturing his figure in crisp detail on film? Renaldi leads us to believe, despite rumour to the contrary, we just might.
Drawn from more than seven years of work, 'Richard Renaldi: Figure and Ground' presents portraits and landscapes taken from coast to coast, across the United States. They form a collective portrait of a population and country going through a process of diversification that has already dramatically enlarged the notion of what defines Middle America.
Renaldi's work melds two classic photographic genres -- portrait and straight landscape -- into a single descriptive frame that speaks as much to a sense of the individuals before the lens as it does to the spaces they inhabit. The omnivorous film-plane of Renaldi's 8-by-10 camera embraces not only the individuals directly in front of it, but the environment that encompasses them as well. If there is truly a center tot he America social landscape, it can be found here in Renaldi's precisely rendered portraits.
