RON HENGGELER

January 7, 2024
chiaroscuro - black and white portraits

Men in San Francisco circa. 1980s & 90s

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’ve been photographing for 45 years and have a photo library holding many thousands of pictures. Some of my favorite photos are the portraits I’ve made.  

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

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

Mary Ellen Mark 

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

Edward Stieglitz

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

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

Oscar Wilde

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

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

Victor Skrebneski

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

Richard Avedon

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

Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

It's one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it's another thing to make a portrait of who they are.

Paul Capoigro

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

My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.

Helmut Newton

A portrait, to be a work of art, neither must nor may resemble the sitter... one must paint its atmosphere.

Umberto Boccioni

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

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

Henri Cartier Bresson

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

Richard Avedon

Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.

Og Mandino

A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph.

Man Ray

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

Chuck Palahniuk