RON HENGGELER

April 29, 2024
Faces of San Francisco - Part 4

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

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

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

Richard Avedon

Color is the fruit of life.

Guillaume Apollinaire

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.

Whether working or not, photographers are looking, seeing, and thinking about what they see, a habit that is both a pleasure and a problem, for we seldom capture in a single photograph the full expression of what we see and feel. 

Sam Abell

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

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

Berenice Abbott

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

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

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

When I make a picture, I make love.

Alfred Stieglitz