RON HENGGELER

May 1, 2024
Faces of San Francisco - Part 6

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

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

Photography is a very subtle thing. You must let the camera take you by the hand, as it were, and lead you into your subject.

Margaret Bourke-White

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm - the relationship between shapes and values.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

In a portrait, I’m looking for the silence in somebody.

Henri Cartier Bresson

What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera (the lens) notes with relentless fidelity.

Berenice Abbott

Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I'm going to take tomorrow.

Imogen Cunningham

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.

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

Sam Fuller

A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed.

Richard Avedon

Photography is not only drawing with light, though light is the indispensable agent of its being. It is modeling or sculpturing with light, to reproduce the plastic form of natural objects. It is painting with light.

Berenice Abbott

In a portrait, you always leave part of yourself behind.

Mary Ellen Mark

For me, a good portrait shows the fragility and humility of the person, and at the same time a strength, a resting in themselves.     

Wolfgang Tillmans

When you are doing portraits, you have that intimacy with someone for a few minutes. For a really good portrait, you don't take the portrait - it's given.

Giles Duley

The countenance is the portrait of the soul, and the eyes mark its intentions.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Everything is a self-portrait.
Everything is a diary.

Chuck Palahniuk