Touching Strangers

Richard Renaldi, "Julie and Xavier, 2007." Image found here.

What do you get when you ask people who don't know each other if they'd be willing to touch each other and have their picture taken?

See for yourself. Be sure to look for the "advance" icon below the photos.

These are intriguing photographs for the viewer, I think: even as we scrutinize these people and ponder what they're thinking as they hold these poses, we're invited to place ourselves in these moments as well and wonder about questions of intimacy and personal space. This photo is especially intriguing to me, given the space/time context suggested by Julie's wedding dress.

This project reminds me of a slip of the tongue I heard during an interview on NPR sometime last year, I think it was, which I think I've mentioned here before. In the course of the interview, a man had meant to say, "There comes a moment in every person's life . . . " but instead said, "There comes a person in every moment's life . . . " I pretty much stopped listening to the interview after he said that. Think of that, the fleeting (or enduring?) quality of "every moment's life," as though it has an existence apart from us that we bear witness to, like a flash of a meteor burning up that we just happen to catch out of the corner of our eye--just like our memories (if we do remember them) of the people who inhabit that moment . . . or, in the case of these folks' consenting to be photographed by Renaldi, something far more, well, memorable.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

I'm still officially away from here, but work should ease up a bit here shortly.