Book Review: ‘A Fearless Eye: The Photography of Barbara Ramos’

[Pelican Press 0]

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Book Review: ‘A Fearless Eye: The Photography of Barbara Ramos’

Barbara Ramos’s ******-and-white street photographs from the late 1960s and early 1970s, when she was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, are far from the fanfare of the Summer of Love. Instead, the art historian Sally Stein writes in A FEARLESS EYE: The Photography of Barbara Ramos (Chronicle, $35), they make for a “multifaceted chronicle” of a “society brewing with diversity” in which, improbably, “the center still held.”

Born in New York City but raised in Los Angeles, Ramos documented the in-between moments of urban living, in images that fill the frame with small and mesmerizing details. A couple waiting for the bus on 16th Street, leaning against the wall that borders the grassy park; a man napping on the hood of his car at Altamont near a group of hippies; a salesman standing in front of a wall of shoe boxes; a daydreaming grandmother rocking a stroller in front of a store window in Chinatown. The clothes and hairstyles feel nostalgic but not saccharine, sideburns and cigarettes placing the images firmly in their era.

“I felt like I became the people I was photographing,” Ramos tells Steven A. Heller in one of the book’s introductory essays. “Every waking minute I was obsessed by looking, by exploring the world.”

Shortly after this series was taken, Ramos put away her camera and her images for 50 years to become a jewelry maker. In 2020, she unearthed negatives, scanned the images and posted them on

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, a single photo each day.

Published for the first time in “A Fearless Eye,” Ramos’s work captures minute and mesmerizing everyday scenes in a city that was about to change drastically.

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