It’s a stunningly simple idea: Find strangers on the street and ask to take their photograph together, physically touching. That’s what Chicago-born artist Richard Renaldi has been doing since 2007 in a project called Touching Strangers, and the results, published in a monograph this spring, now visit Seattle. Tonight you can ask Renaldi how, exactly, he chooses people, and whether he makes up stories for them, too, like the rest of us do when we see the portraits. What can we imagine is possible between people? (Photographic Center Northwest, 900 12th Ave, pcnw.org, 6–9 pm, $10, through Oct 29)

Jen Graves (The Stranger’s former arts critic) mostly writes about things you approach with your eyeballs. But she’s also a history nerd interested in anything that needs more talking about, from male...