Recent series by Renaldi is a photographic diary of Manhattan in the wee hours of Sunday mornings from 2010 through today
he George Eastman Museum will open Richard Renaldi: Manhattan Sunday on January 21, 2017, in the Project Gallery. Exhibited at a museum for the first time, photographer Richard Renaldi’s new series consists of portraits, urban still lifes, and streetscapes made in the wee hours of Sunday morning, when post-bacchanalian characters join early-morning workers in New York City’s nooks and crannies. Richard Renaldi: Manhattan Sunday will be on view through June 11, 2017.
“I now find myself cruising the streets of Manhattan early on Sunday mornings with my 8x10 camera, seeking out night revelers, circuit boys, prostitutes, garbage collectors, and drunks: the workers and worshipers of the night as they find their way home, exhausted or exhilarated, steeled for a new day,” said Richard Renaldi in 2015.
Renaldi uses an 8×10-inch view camera to make his pictures, resulting in meticulous black-and-white images that magnify the uniqueness of each subject while capturing the singular mood that suffuses the city in the hours before dawn. Implicit in the work is Renaldi’s personal experience as a gay nightclub denizen in New York during and after the AIDS crisis, as well as his appreciation for the myriad and motley ways that the urban context encourages social awareness and a strong, if temporary, sense of community.
“Richard Renaldi photographs everyday people in a manner that makes each of them in that moment seem extraordinary, a talent evident in his portraits since the beginning of his career,” said Lisa Hostetler, Curator in Charge, the Department of Photography, George Eastman Museum. “The distinctive atmosphere around daybreak is something that most of us have experienced at some point in our lives—for better or worse reasons—and Richard is adept at evoking that feeling in compelling images that underscore our common humanity.”
About Richard Renaldi
Richard Renaldi (b. 1968) was born in Chicago and currently lives in New York City. He received his BFA in photography from New York University in 1990. Exhibitions of his photographs have been mounted in galleries and museums throughout the United States, Asia, and Europe. Manhattan Sunday has already garnered praise from a variety of sources, including the Guggenheim Foundation, which awarded Renaldi a fellowship in 2015 based on the project, and Aperture Foundation, which has published the series in book form. Aperture also published Renaldi’s Touching Strangers in 2014 and Figure and Ground in 2006.
About the George Eastman Museum
Founded in 1947, the George Eastman Museum is the world’s oldest photography museum and one of the largest film archives in the United States, located on the historic Rochester estate of entrepreneur and philanthropist George Eastman, the pioneer of popular photography. Its holdings comprise more than 400,000 photographs, 28,000 motion picture films, the world’s preeminent collection of photographic and cinematographic technology, one of the leading libraries of books related to photography and cinema, and extensive holdings of documents and other objects related to George Eastman. As a research and teaching institution, the Eastman Museum has an active publishing program and, through its two joint master’s degree programs with the University of Rochester, makes critical contributions to the fields of film preservation and of photographic preservation and collection management. For more information, visit eastman.org
