Ron Cohe
WHY PORTRAITS? Photography has been a life-long passion for me. I had originally planned to devote myself in retirement to street photography. But time and again, I found myself drawn to a subset of that genre, candid portraits. Black-and-white frees them to tell a story. Some reveal fleeting moments of mood or emotion. Others anchor an unfolding story line. The best of them appeal to emotions as well as senses. The latter I’ve come to regard as "Portraits with Soul."
All the images presented here I regard as "street" photos even though few were taken on an actual street. Candid, informal and expressive, they earn the rubric of "street" in today’s parlance by their character rather than their location. Some few, of course, are traditional street photos, not portraits at all.
For me, photography is a creative journey. It keeps me going in my old age. I wake up each day looking forward to the ever-fresh challenge of taking a good photo.
INFLUENCES. The following bits of wisdom have influenced my photography, and often my outlook on life, as well:
The human face is the universal language. -Dorothea Lange
Color is descriptive. Black and white is interpretive. -Elliott Erwitt
When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their souls. -Ted Grant
To suggest is to create; to describe is to destroy. -Robert Doisneau
If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough. -Robert Capa
We do not take pictures with our cameras, but with our hearts and minds. -Arnold Newman
Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. -Henri Cartier-Bresson
In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind. -Louis Pasteur
I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. -Joseph Campbell
We can do anything we want; the trick is, it’s usually waiting for us just beyond our comfort zone. -Winston Hendrickson
This above all: to thine own self be true… -Polonious in Shakespeare’s Hamlet