A friend helped him buy a camera…
A friend and coworker encouraged 20-year-old Ron Terner to explore his artistic side by helping him purchase a camera. It was then, he says, that he experienced “a magical moment” and felt drawn to photography as a career.
Fifty-plus years later he continues to see his surroundings via a camera lens, chronicling events, capturing priceless moments, and creating an endless energy for art that draws in all around him.
In September 2024, Ron Terner celebrated 50 years of his Focal Point Gallery on City Island in the Bronx, NY. In addition to owning a gallery, Terner also taught photography workshops at the local community center and witnessed the birth of Photoshop, which inspired him to adopt digital photography at the dawn of the movement. But he wasn’t always a photographer.
Terner’s parents were Holocaust survivors. They were high school sweethearts back in Vienna and torn apart by the war. They both landed in NYC – his father in Harlem and his mother in Queens. They reunited by happenstance at the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens, got married and had two sons.
Terner grew up on Daly Avenue in the Bronx near the Bronx Zoo and would hop the fence to ogle at the zebras and seals as a young kid.
Terner’s father was a lab technician who worked his way up to a parasitologist and took Terner under his wing. At the age of 14, Terner was working in the Rheumatic Disease Unit at Montefiore Hospital and eventually worked his way up to a lab technician as well. But Terner knew in his heart that he wanted to be an artist and his maternal grandmother, Anne Kellogg from Vienna, helped keep that dream alive.
Self portrait, Ron Terner, 2025
“It was hard for my parents for me to become an artist,” said Terner. “I don’t think my mother and father were that thrilled that that was the life I decided.”
However, Terner came from a long line of artists and performers and credits Kellogg as his influence.
“She’s why I became an artist,” said Terner of his grandmother who would always take him to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Our favorite was the impressionist wing.”
Terner’s grandmother fostered his talent and creativity, and it was because of her that he knew he had a gift to pursue. In the end, his parents, now both deceased – his mother just recently (September 2024) – applauded his choice.
Terner himself applauds the City Island community for his success and said he could not have done it without them.
“It accepted me, and I became the artist/photographer that I am today because of City Island.”
Excerpts taken from a November 2023 Bronx Times article by ET Rodriguez.
Photograph by ET Rodriguez