RON HENGGELER

April 30, 2024
Faces of San Francisco - Part 5

I’ve been photographing in San Francisco and the Bay Area for 47 years. I have a photo library holding many thousands of pictures. Some of my favorite photos are the portraits I’ve made. 

For the past two weeks, I've been revisiting my photo collections to select only portraits that I am then editing and posting on Instagram as reels paired with classical music. Here are some of the portraits that were chosen. 

The full collection of these portraits in seven parts with music can be viewed here: 

Instagram-ronhenggeler

A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks.

        Richard Averdon

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

Susan Sontag

To take photographs means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis.
Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.

Aaron Siskind

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.   Edward Stieglitz

Life is in color, but black and white is more realistic.

Sam Fuller

Chiaroscuro is an Italian term which literally means ‘light-dark’. In paintings and photos, the description refers to clear tonal contrasts which are often used to suggest the volume and modeling of the subjects depicted.

I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important.

Jacques Henri-Lartigue

Some photographers take reality... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.

Ansel Adams

With photography, you zero in; you put a lot of energy into short moments, and then you go on to the next thing.

Robert Mapplethorpe

Imagination is the highest kite one can fly."

Lauren Bacall

To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.

William Blake