Richard Renaldi is a professional photographer who has been working on a years-long project where he takes people who've never met and poses them together as if they are family, great friends, or even lovers. The resulting photographs are amazing.
He takes these unrelated, unacquainted posers and literally puts them as posers into his photos -- Posers becoming posers for a cause.
The most fascinating part of this is that he is currently doing this project in the heart of New York City. Renaldi calls his project Touching Strangers.
It's amazing to me that such a large and often impersonal city as New York has so many hidden gems of people willing to partake in this experience. It makes me want to create a similar project in my middle school. Well, not the strangers-as-lovers part, but the strangers-as-friends and strangers-as-family part would be cool.
I could go to the lunchroom in front of all the kiddos and see if I can get volunteers of people who either don't know each other or simply have never, would never, hang out. It might be kind of interesting to see which kids are willing to bridge the barriers, which kids will follow, and which would never be caught doing it.
Anyway, I know this is slightly different than my usual posts, especially since I'm not complaining about some part of my body committing hari-kari on me, nor ranting about some workplace injustice, nor recounting some tale of horror from my time on a road trip.
But for now I am simply enthralled by Renaldi's genius. What a wonderful gift to the people who get to be part of this project. If only the world were a lot more like this.
This is the link to a short article and a video about the photographer and his project:
http://elitedaily.com/news/world/photographer-puts-two-strangers-together-for-intimate-photographs-and-the-results-are-surprising/
