RON HENGGELER

February 5, 2024
San Francisco City Hall 

The original City Hall structure, completed in 1898 at McAllister and Larkin Streets, collapsed in a heap during the 1906 earthquake. The focal point of the Civic Center, the current City Hall, was designed by John Bakewell and Arthur Brown. This 1915 building covers two city blocks bounded by Polk, McAllister, Van Ness, and Grove. The huge lead-lined dome is modeled after Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome and dominates the area, rising 301 feet above the street, higher than the Capitol dome in Washington D.C.

Respectfully taken from SAN FRANCISCO SECRETS by John Snyder
Chronicle Books 1999

When I make a picture, I make love.

Alfred Stieglitz

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind. 

Dorothea Lange

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

Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

Berenice Abbott

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

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

You know there are moments such as these when time stands still and all you do is hold your breath and hope it will wait for you. Dorothea Lange

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

Richard Averdon

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

The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler.

Walker Evans

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.

Berenice Abbott

The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.

Imogen Cunningham

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

Camera lies all the time. It's all it does is lie, because when you choose this moment instead of this moment, when you... the moment you've made a choice, you're lying about something larger. 'Lying' is an ugly word. I don't mean lying. But any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.

Richard Averdon

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

Imogen Cunningham

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

I have a vision of life, and I try to find equivalents for it in the form of photographs.

Alfred Stieglitz

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

Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.

Arnold Newman

San Francisco City Hall