RON HENGGELER

January 20, 2024
Portraits in Black & White

Chiaroscuro 

Old photos of friends and acquaintances, and the Golden Gate Bridge

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.

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

Mary Ellen Mark

There is no stupidity great enough to ruin the majesty of the Golden Gate Bridge. It has been the subject of terrible poetry and worse paintings, but it rises easily and grandly above the mundane, its towers poking through the fogs, natural and man-made.  

Herb Caen

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

Edward Stieglitz

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

Oscar Wilde

The portrait of a person is one of the most difficult things to do. It means you must almost bring the presence of that person photographed to other people in such a way that they don't have to know that person personally, but that they are still confronted with a human being that they won't forget. That's a portrait.

Paul Strand

When you drive in on a Sunday evening after a hot day in the country and catch that first glimpse of the white fog racing in shreds---as though torn from a giant Kleenex box! --- yes, flinging itself, Kleenix-like, through the cables of the world’s greatest if too narrow bridge, you know why you live here.  

Herb Caen

Portraits are the most intimate photographs. The image will survive the subject.

Victor Skrebneski

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

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

Henri Cartier-Bresson

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph. 

Richard Avedon

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

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

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

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

Marcus Tullius Cicero

We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.      

 Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

The bay of San Francisco has been celebrated from the time of its first discovery as one of the finest in the world. It rises into an importance far above that of a mere harbor. . . Its latitude position is that of Lisbon, Its climate that of Southern Italy, settlements attest to its healthfulness, bold shores and mountains give it grandeur, the extent and fertility of its dependent country give it great resources for agriculture, commerce, and population. . . To this gate I gave the name Chrysopylae or Golden Gate. . .

John Fremont 

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

Richard Avedon

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

Chuck Palahniuk