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. 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.Christine, 2003, is part of a series of portraits Renaldi shot in Fresno, California. As the artist drove around in a rental car scouting out people and shots, he saw Christine walking down the street with her boyfriend. “I thought she was quite lovely and luckily for me, she agreed to pose for the photograph,” says Renaldi. The couple said that they were currently homeless, so they asked Renaldi to send the photograph to a relative. He has since tried to locate Christine to let her know that she is on the cover of Richard Renaldi: Figure and Ground (Aperture, 2006), but has had no luck.
