Richard Renaldi: Western Lives

                          
Richard Renaldi, Buba, Havre, MT, 2006                                             Tayla H., Parker, AZ, 2004

The exhibition “Richard Renaldi: Western Lives,” is a combination of three different photographic projects from 2004-2006: The Great Plains, Bus Travelers, and Navajo Nation. The impetus and spark behind all three is the same in that Renaldi photographs people of all ages and walks of life through a vast stretch of the country that is probably considered off the radar in terms of the urban centers on each coast. He also tends to focus somewhat on closed communities, as least in the temporary—the random gatherings of disparate folks in bus terminals, residents of small towns in the middle of the Great Plains or the various peoples comprising the Navajo Nation of Arizona. Renaldi’s forthright presentation of his subjects, mostly centered within the image and straight forwardly facing the camera, telegraph a certain confidence in who they are, how they present themselves to the world, and what their expectations are from this particular weighted interaction. For the most part, the personae of these three series are embedded in the locales and vast stretches of the country that are as forgettable, numbing, and anonymous to some as they are beautiful, extraordinary, stark, and gorgeous to others.

                                  
                                                Richard Renaldi, Tawni, Havre, MT 2006

Renaldi encapsulates and offers a most precious intimacy with his subjects. They reveal themselves to him and to us in the fraught interaction that photography creates between subject, artist, and viewer. There is no attempt on the part of the artist or subject to implicitly dramatize or heroicize their situation, even though the images are staged and planned with full participation on both sides. They do not look as such, which makes all the difference. The process by which Renaldi creates this work is more cumbersome and time-consuming than the images implicitly convey. The photographs are composed to look like the subjects were just happened upon and snapped in an instant. The 8 x 10 Wisner camera that Renaldi sets up with the tripod is cumbersome and oversized, with the entire process and interaction sometimes taking up to ten minutes to complete.

Renaldi’s portraits are not objective studies on the sociology of place or a rigid categorization of a certain subculture, but are highly subjective and suggestive realms of personality imbued by their rather stark surroundings. There is a surprising candor about these portraits as these strangers, coaxed by the photographer, have opened up their lives to us for all sorts of judgments and emotions: visual aesthetic pleasure, derision, boredom, fascination, and quite possibly feeling nothing at all. The tension and persuasive quality of the images rewards close looking and arises from being both timeless and of the moment simultaneously.

The artist is currently living in New York City, where he received his BA in photography from New York University in 1990. He has had solo gallery exhibitions in both Los Angeles and New York and was featured in the International Center of Photography's first triennial of photography in 2003. Aperture has recently published the first monograph, Figure/Ground relating to seven years of the artist's projects.