RON HENGGELER

January 29, 2024

My life is a marvelous collage

The jars, and other pictures from around the house

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

Dorothea Lange

Color is the fruit of life.

Guillaume Apollinaire  

We are a landscape of all we have seen. 

Isamu Noguchi

Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art.

Maya Angelou

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

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

Marcel Duchamp

My works were designed to amuse, annoy, bewilder, mystify and inspire reflection.

Man Ray

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

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

San Francisco is the genius of American cities.  It is the wild-eyed, all-fired, hard-boiled, tender-hearted, white-haired boy of the American family of cities.  It is the prodigal son.  The city which does everything and is always forgiven, because of its great heart, its gentle smile, its roaring laughter, its mysterious and magnificent personality.   There are no end of ways of enduring time in San Francisco, pleasantly, beautifully, and with the romance of living in everything.  Eat any kind of dish the races of the world know how to prepare.  Drink any kind of wine you like.  Go to the opera.  The symphony or a stage play.  Loaf around in the high-toned bars, or in the honky-tonks.  Sail the bay.  If you are alive, you can’t be bored in San Francisco.  If you’re not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life.  San Francisco is a world to explore.  It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure.  It is a city in which the spirit can know refreshment every day. “(circa 1891)

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

Edward Stieglitz

One must picture everything in the world as an enigma, and live in the world as if in a vast museum of strangeness.

Giorgio de Chirico

Dada is not modern at all; it is rather a return to a quasi-Buddhist religion of indifference. Dada puts an artificial sweetness onto things, a snow of butterflies coming out of a conjurer’s skull. Dada is stillness and does not understand the passions.

Tristan Tzara

When I adjust materials of different kinds to one another, I have taken a step in advance of mere oil painting, for in addition to playing off color against color, line against line, form against form, etc., I play off material against material, for example, wood against sackcloth. 

Kurt Schwitters

Memories are hunting horns whose sound dies on the wind.

Guillaume Apollinaire

The piece of white marble that the Magi is kneeing on, is from the original San Francisco City Hall that was destroyed in the 1906 Earthquake & Fire. The building stood on the site of today's Main Library at Grove and Hyde. The piece of wood on the Magi's back is from the foundation of the famous 1851 Belli Building, located a half block from the Transamerica Pyramid. The building stood on the shoreline of Yerba Buena Cove during the Gold Rush. The contents in the jar are also from the site of the Belli Building.

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

Chuck Palahniuk

Every normal human being (and not merely the ‘artist’) has an inexhaustible store of buried images in his subconscious, it is merely a matter of courage or liberating procedures ... of voyages into the unconscious, to bring pure and unadulterated found objects to light. Max Ernst

It’s the viewer that makes the work.

Marcel Duchamp

When we pay attention to nature's music, we find that everything on the Earth contributes to its harmony.

Harat Inayat Khan

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

Everything has two aspects; the current aspect, which we see nearly always and which ordinary men see, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals may see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction.

Giorgio de Chirico 

Whatever we believe about how we got to be the extraordinary creatures we are today is far less important than bringing our intellect to bear on how do we get together now around the world and get out of the mess that we've made. That's the key thing now. Never mind how we got to be who we are.

Jane Goodall

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

Henri Cartier-Bresson

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Henry David Thoreau

Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. 

Henri Cartier-Bresson

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Albert Einstein

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. 

Marcel Duchamp

The artist performs only one part of the creative process. The onlooker completes it, and it is the onlooker who has the last word.

Marcel Duchamp

To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.

Giorgio de Chirico

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

But it's peculiar, as soon as I am in the midst of nature and by myself, everything that is base and trivial vanishes without trace. On such days nothing scares me; and this helps me again and again. 

Gustav Mahler

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

Collage is a supersensitive and scrupulously accurate instrument, similar to a seismograph, which is able to record the exact amount of the possibility of human happiness at any period.

Max Ernst

The artist is a spectator, indifferent or impassioned, at the birth of his work, and observes the phases of its development. 

Max Ernst

Living is a horizontal fall.

Jean Cocteau

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

Marcus Aurelius

That City of Gold to which adventurers congregated out of all the winds of heaven. I wonder what enchantment of the 'Arabian Nights' can have equaled this evocation of a roaring city, in a few years of a man's life, from the marshes and the blowing sand.

Robert Louis Stevenson

In your own bosom you bear your heaven and earth, 
And all you behold, though it appears without, 
It is within, in your imagination, 
Of which this world of mortality is but a shadow. 

William Blake

Every hour of every day is an unspeakably perfect miracle.

Walt Whitman

What is past is prologue. 

William Shakespeare