Tracing transitions via young men of Fall River
Fall River, for many people, is the sort of place you leave, while Cape Cod is the sort of place you go to.
A decade ago, Richard Renaldi had the reverse experience.
"I got to know Fall River because I live in New York and started vacationing on the Cape," Renaldi recalled earlier this month. He was at Bernard Toale Projects, in the South End, prior to a book-signing for his photo collection "Fall River Boys."
"You have to drive over the Braga Bridge, right through Fall River. It just really appealed to me: this working-class, New England look - the beautiful old textile mills, which are really stunning. So I was drawn to that. I wanted to explore. One day on the way back from the Cape I brought my view camera and film."
"Fall River Boys" is the product of that exploration. The book consists of 89 black-and-white photographs Renaldi took over the past decade during trips to the gritty Southeastern Massachusetts city of 90,000. A few of the images are cityscapes. The lion's share are portraits of teenagers. Most of them, as the title suggests, are male. All the images express a powerful sense of place.
"I feel a strong affection for the town," Renaldi said of Fall River. With his extensive tattoos and chiseled physique, he might pass for an older version of one of his subjects. Yet even though he looks a decade younger than his age, 41, Renaldi is no boy. And as someone who's worked as a photo editor at Magnum, the celebrated photo agency, and traveled on photographic projects throughout the United States, his world extends far beyond the banks of the Taunton River. "Essentially, I'm still an outsider," Renaldi said.
The book, which came out in March, was scheduled to receive its semi-official local unveiling at a reception for Renaldi at the Fall River Historical Society yesterday. "It'll be interesting to see," Michael Martins, the society's curator, said last week of residents' response to the book.
"Richard is a visionary," Martins said in a telephone interview. "He captured something no one else has. He's captured these characters just at the brink, no longer boys, but not quite men."
In some respects, Martins said, Renaldi's work in "Fall River Boys" recalls the work of another photographer who documented youth in the city. "A century ago, Lewis Hine did photographs of child workers in the textile mills here, and Richard's work bears comparison to those."
It seems almost fated that Renaldi would photograph Fall River. His website, www.renaldi.com, offers examples from an impressively diverse range of subjects: surfers, bodybuilders, gay and lesbian seniors, New York's Madison Avenue, bus passengers. Renaldi also has a recurring interest in downtrodden locales: Newark, Fresno, Calif., failing towns on the Great Plains.
"There's something very tactile, visually, about these places," Renaldi said. "I'm drawn to Main Street America, rather than strip-mall America. And Fall River is interesting because it's unique but also could stand in for a lot of New England towns. People look at these pictures and they say this reminds them of Providence or Lowell.
"There's a definite sociological component to my work," Renaldi added, "but it's not hit-you-over-the-head. It's a little more subtle. I've always been interested in ideas of class and, well, what's happening in America."
Lisa Hatchadoorian, who curated Renaldi's 2007 exhibition, "Western Lives," at the Nicolaysen Art Museum, in Casper, Wyo., said in an e-mail last week that she sees "an archetypal quality" in the photographer's work, which "makes the photos (and people) so poignant and unforgettable."
Renaldi's portraiture, Hatchadoorian said, "seems to be as much about place as it is about the person - even if the place is generic, anonymous, and blurry in the photo. . . . His subjects seem so tied to their environment."
"Figure and Ground," Renaldi's first book, was published three years ago by Aperture. Now he's his own publisher. Renaldi and his partner, Seth Boyd, are owners of Charles Lane Press (named after the street they live on in Greenwich Village). "Fall River Boys" is the press' first book.
"It's really fun making it," Renaldi said of producing a book. "And it's really hard selling it. . . . We're trying to distinguish ourselves as a niche press that does small press runs - one book a year, for now - and that works with the best printers. People do care about that, but right now it's tough, because of the economy."
Renaldi grew up in the Chicago area and studied photography at New York University. His discovery of the medium came in high school. "It was like the first thing I did that I was actually good at it," Renaldi recalled. "I picked up the camera and started making pictures and I liked it. I think in high school when you find something you do well it gives you confidence. It's such a vulnerable time."
Renaldi can see that vulnerability in his "Fall River Boys" subjects. It's one of the things that moved him to photograph them.
"I think it's very interesting coming of age as a young man in a town that's somewhat limited in opportunities, and telling that story," Renaldi said. "Also it's this awkward time in your life when you're growing into your new body. That also applies to females, but it happens at a younger age; and girls in their teens are very, very hard to photograph. They're quite distrustful, understandably, and extremely giggly. Boys somehow have a little more seriousness; you can approach them that way.
"I photograph women in all my other work, and a few in Fall River, but I did want to focus on young men for those reasons. And it's interesting to me that your body is in this adolescent phase for only a short time. Then you grow into a full person, and that's it - until, of course, you shrink, 50 years later! So it's an interesting time. And there's impressionability: I think males are more open at that age."
The sense of connection between Renaldi and his subjects in "Fall River Boys" is palpable. Does he consider them collaborators?
"Definitely I see them as collaborators, definitely," he said. "They're giving me part of themselves: their time, their image."
Each collaboration starts the same way: with a straightforward request.
"It's always the way I shoot everything," Renaldi said. "I just approach people and stop them on the street. It comes naturally to me. It's my mom. She's a talker. . . . Sometimes it's difficult. But if someone says no it's no big deal. A lot of people are afraid of rejection or crossing some social boundary. You just have to realize people are generally nice.
"I will bring a copy of the book or whatever I'm working on and explain what I'm doing. Then they see the camera and go, 'Holy [expletive],' [because] that's something from another planet."
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com. 