Richard Renaldi

My husband gets a lot of photography magazines that tend to be a bore, but the latest issue of PDN featured the work of American artist Richard Renaldi whose work captured my attention. 'Figure and Ground', Renaldi's latest book, was the product of seven years of traveling to capture slices of America and it's people with a large format camera.

Richard photographs everyone from rich girls to cowboys and every color in between. Most of the time when I see a portrait I'm distracted by the cleverness of the photography and styling and there seems to be a barrier that keeps me from relating to the subject. But Renaldi shoots each figure in their own clothes, in a natural environment at or near where he found them. The result is that he encourages us to make up stories for ourselves. The people he photographs seem to be surrendering their private lives for a moment. I think pictures like this are easy to dismiss because of their 'ugliness' but this is really what we look like, and that's a beautiful thing!