Review: ‘Touching Strangers’ touches truths about connection

Richard Renaldi’s series of photographic portraits, “Touching Strangers,” is driven by a concept that could easily be dismissed as a gimmick if it weren’t so thoughtfully realized and deeply appealing.

Renaldi, based in New York, conducts a social experiment through this work, plucking people off the street who have never seen each other before and posing them as if intimates.

He has been making these crisply composed, color pictures since 2007. In a wall statement accompanying his irresistibly moving show at Loyola Marymount University’s Laband Art Gallery, Renaldi refers to what he stages as “fictional, spontaneous relationships acted out as street performances” in front of his tripod-mounted view camera.

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While the situation is certainly contrived, it catalyzes something that looks and feels genuine, the fundamentally human impulse to connect.

A police officer stands with his arms looped around the shoulders of a teenage girl. An older woman clasps hands with a man who has dropped to his knees to match her height.

Some of the pairings (and occasional threesomes) seem utterly natural and others incongruous for their crossing of the ostensible boundaries of class and race, as well as age. Renaldi’s subjects sit on each other’s laps, press their cheeks and bodies against each other.

They nearly always face the camera with a directness that hints of confrontation, challenge. Their expressions and their tenderness dare us to admit why the images surprise us. They urge us to wonder what else, what more, we all might be capable of.

Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, 1 LMU Drive, Fritz B. Burns Fine Arts Center, through Nov. 22. (310) 338-2880, www.cfa.lmu.edu/laband