RON HENGGELER

April, 27, 2024
Faces of San Francisco - Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Avedon

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chrissie Martenstein

2006 was the 100 year anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. In 2006, Chrissie at 109 years old, was the oldest living survivor of the '06 event.

She was 9 years old at the time of the earthquake. She said that she woke that morning to "a big shock and a great deal of misery."On the night of April 18th in 1906, with the city besieged with uncontrolled burning, she and her family slept on the sidewalk outside their home near Market and Van Ness out of fear of aftershocks. Chrissie never once left the city she loved. She lived in San Francisco her entire life. 

I take great pride in having been Chrissie's favorite waiter at the Big 4 Restaurant. It was an honor knowing her and being a part of her remarkable life. She was an inspiration to everyone who knew her. She was once asked by Mayor Gavin Newsome her secret to longevity? Her reply . . .

"I look forward to my martini every afternoon at five . . . "

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

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

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

Life is in color, but black and white is more realistic.

Sam Fuller

The full collection of these portraits in seven parts with music can be viewed here:

Instagram-ronhenggeler