Figure and Ground

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.