Author: Barbara Ramos' Fearless Eye

Enter the photographic world of Barbara Ramos through her new book A Fearless Eye: The Photography of Barbara Ramos: San Francisco and California 1969-1973 (Chronicle Books, 2025). Ramos will discuss the photographs in the book, which capture the extraordinary ordinariness of San Franciscans of all ages, backgrounds and life paths during one of the city's most iconic eras. She will also talk about her life, career and distinctive artistic point of view, in which her respect for her subjects and her fine-tuned eye allow the city and its people to reveal their secret stories. 

Between 1969 and 1973, the young photographer Barbara Ramos walked the streets of San Francisco, shooting pictures of people. For this brief time, her sharp eye and empathetic gaze allowed her to create a body of work that was incisively historic, timelessly human and luminously beautiful. Then she stopped photographing.
 

Fifty years later, Ramos unpacked her images to discover an astonishing record of a time, a place, and a people. Her photographs offer up stirring scenes from everyday life - a group of Hari Krishnas sing on Market Street, a window dresser changes a mannequin at Union Square Macy’s, two men lean in for a kiss at a peace rally in Golden Gate Park. The unearthing of Ramos’s archives revealed the work of a previously unknown master of twentieth-century photography, whose work has earned a place alongside that of Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and Vivian Maier.

In this book, Ramos’s photographs are published for the first time. A preface by award winning novelist and essayist Rachel Kushner, an essay by photography historian Sally Stein, and an interview with Ramos by photographer and writer Steven A. Heller contextualize the images and the era in which they were taken.
 

Barbara Ramos was born in New York City and raised in Los Angeles. She earned a BFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MA in Interdisciplinary Arts from San Francisco State University.

A Fearless Eye has received critical praise from The New York Times, KQED, the independent San Francisco culture website 48 Hills, and more. 

Space limited. Seats available first come, first served.