At the museum a few weeks ago, an elderly woman in a crisp white shirt and designer eyeglasses caught my eye. She wielded a cane and had a strait-laced young man by her side. Grandson, I thought, comparing heights and ages and comportment towards one another.
This is a game I play on occasion. It’s an indulgence well suited to city life, readily available on the beach, at the bus stop, in restaurants and everywhere else people go in pairs and in groups. Nanny or mother? Mother or grandmother? Grandpa or boyfriend? Friend or lover? The possibilities run as innocuous or as offensive as the imagination, personal experience and prejudices of the observer.
My own go something like this: A Hasidic man, pale and outfitted in a dark hat and suit, stands arm in arm with a buff African-American man. The former is bearded, the latter wears cornrows. They look to be about the same age, maybe early thirties. The strangeness of their pairing is not what gets me. Maybe because I’m a thirty-something woman and a Reform Jew, maybe for other reasons, who really knows the source of our individual prejudices, I think this: Oh, so it’s okay for a Hasidic man to touch a black man but not an unrelated Jewish woman? Nice. Score one for anti-racism, score zero for anti-sexism.
The two men, named Shalom and Jeff, were photographed by Richard Renaldi in Brooklyn in 2013. They’d never met before, and it’s unlikely they’ll meet again. Since 2007, Renaldi has been asking strangers to strike similarly intimate poses with one another in front of his 8×10-inch view camera in public and semi-public places across the United States. A selection of the uneven but ultimately engrossing series that resulted, called “Touching Strangers,” is on display at LUMA, the Loyola University Museum of Art, through early August.
Perhaps the hardest thing to fathom here is that people agreed to do this, to touch hands, link arms, embrace, kiss, hold and be held by complete strangers. The people in these photographs are not performance artists. They are random men, women and children that Renaldi encountered in parks and cafés and on the street, in cities and towns as far afield as Kaneohe, Hawaii and Nome, Alaska, as central as New Orleans and Los Angeles. How he managed to convince them to do something so taboo that it is embedded in common cultural cliche — think stranger danger or the concept of personal space — is left mostly unexplained in the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue. That’s fine. Jackson Pollock didn’t publish how-to’s for his drip technique.
LUMA, alas, made the mistake of asking students, alumnae and faculty of its School of Social Work to explain how these strangers ended up in each others’ arms. Their suggestions are bafflingly heartwarming, pointing to cliches of clarity, hope, togetherness and intimacy that belie the complex realities of the photographs to an extent that seems willful.
Apart from the mesmerizingly odd portrait of Jared, a besuited man who, eyes closed, drapes his arms woodenly around Seth, a delicate teenager seated with legs crossed in front of an immense gilded port scene at the Frick Collection, a lush private museum on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the photographs in “Touching Strangers” are for the most part unremarkable as photographs. But they are good enough, and more importantly they are powerful indicators of the ways in which we make sense of the world, or fail to. I still haven’t figured out what Jared and Seth’s relationship might be.
That swarthy guy in the baseball cap, stubble and hand tattoos — what’s he doing holding the little blond girl, the one who looks like an American Girl Place doll? Renaldi has them provocatively posed as a modern-day Pieta, and the pairing is obviously jarring in terms of urban versus suburban styling, grit versus innocence, but what they really look like to me is a father and daughter, with similarly wary gazes and unsmiling lips.
The extent to which unrelated people look alike has always fascinated me, but it’s the implied diversity of the contemporary family that is truly moving here. Nearly all of the photographs in Renaldi’s series that include young children do something like this, calmly stoking ideas about what families can look like, and be like, today.
There’s nothing creepy about the miming of parental care, but there is something louche about strangers groping one another as if they were couples — gestures that a few of Renaldi’s subjects act out for the camera, with predictably seedy results. Also, they’re just plain predictable: heterosexual rockers in a tattoo parlor, buff beachgoers in Venice. Better are pairings suggestive of alternate romance, and there are plenty here, but except for a poignantly awkward embrace between two young women, LeAsia and Rebecca, who wear an electrifying clash of red and hot pink garments, they’re mostly demure. Nicholas and Caleb, stiffly holding hands in Philly, could be on a first date. It’s unclear if there’ll be a second. Tari, Shawn and Summer, a hip Los Angeles trio, could be the leaders of a messianic new cult, or just a new Indie band posing for a promo shot.
Some pictures feel profound because of the people in them — Petey, a multiple amputee with facial disfigurement; Dawn, a bald woman whose lack of eyebrows suggests ongoing chemotherapy — and the straightforwardness with which they are treated. Disability and disease are so often hidden that, when finally shown, hardly anyone knows how to respond. Here it’s with a kindness that seems magical for being so casual: Soukhet cradles the smooth side of Dawn’s head and presses their faces together, Junior holds Petey’s arm stump as if it were his hand.
Other photographs — an effete black boy in a mint tank top, his hand on the shoulder of a grimacing cowboy; a geared-up cop, his arms around the neck of a teen girl as uneasy as she is leggy — seem designed to elicit nervousness. They can’t help but push hot buttons wired to the worst news stories of the day. A decade from now they will hopefully register as portraits no more or less charged than any other.
That, however, is not up to the photographs, the photographed or the photographer. It’s up to the rest of us.
“Richard Renaldi: Touching Strangers” runs through August 2 at the Loyola University Museum of Art, 820 North Michigan Avenue, 312-915-7600, http://www.luc.edu/luma.
Lori Waxman is a special contributor to the Tribune, and a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute.
