Nostalgic photos of everyday life in ’70s San Francisco

Growing up in LA’s fabled San Fernando Valley during the ​’50s and ​’60s, Barbara Ramos developed ​“the habit of ​‘looking’ all the time”. She took up photography long before it was considered a viable career path, let alone a fine art, leaving home in 1969 at age 19 to study at the San Francisco Art Institute. 

“I always knew that I was an artist and was obsessed by the act of photographing my environment,” says Ramos, whose first apartment was on Sutter Street, near Polk in Lower Nob Hill, a flourishing gay hub at the time. As the Summer of Love gave way to Gay Liberation, San Francisco stood as a beacon on the hill, drawing baby boomers seeking community, freedom, and self-expression. 

But Ramos noticed a distinctive schism in the fabric of city life, the native San Franciscans a more conservative lot who saw their hometown increasingly become a playground for radical youth. The implicit tensions between the old and new guard formed the foundation of her work as Ramos traversed the streets of San Francisco between 1969 and 1973. 

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After the photographs were made, Ramos’s intimate portraits of carnies with whips, Hare Krishnas mid chant, well-heeled locals, and queer love all but disappeared – until 2020, when she and her husband Joe decided to digitise the archive. Looking at the photographs again for the first time in 50 years, Ramos remembers feeling like she had discovered a long lost love. ​“I felt like I was finally home,” she says. ​“Photography was what I should have been doing all along.” 

And now, at 75, she finally is. After her first solo exhibition at the Sanchez Art Center in Pacifica in 2023, Ramos returns with her debut monograph A Fearless Eye: The Photography of Barbara Ramos – San Francisco and California, 1969 – 1973 (Chronicle). The book brings together Ramos’s exquisite images of everyday life, which are both at once intimate and anonymous. With the passage of time, these seemingly prosaic images have evolved into heartfelt scenes of a vanishing world. 

Although Ramos was shy, the camera became her ​“invisible shield”, allowing her to craft portraits at a time when the practice of street photography was extremely rare. ​“The camera was an extension of my body,” she says. ​“I was quiet. I didn’t carry on with long conversations. It became somewhat of a dance for both of us.” 

Read next: Photos of what San Francisco really looked like in the ​’60s

While people never asked for a photograph, they responded to the presence of the camera without self-consciousness or vanity. Consider the man with bedraggled hair sitting on a bus, his small dog tucked neatly inside a sweater vest, or the turbaned woman in a cut out dress playing to the camera as matrons smile on admiringly during an art opening at the de Young Museum. Ramos found moments of mutuality in these passing encounters, capturing them with effortlessness.

“To me, all the people I photographed were beautiful, similar to drawing a model in the classroom,” Ramos says. ​“I felt connected to everyone I photographed, as if we were all one. I think that was what I was trying to convey in my photography.” 

A Fearless Eye: The Photography of Barbara Ramos is published by Chronicle Books.

Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.

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