Opening reception: Friday, March 6, 5-8 pm
Exhibit Dates: March 6 – May 16, 2026
For photographer Barbara Ramos, making images demanded complete presence—a state of heightened awareness she found incompatible with the competing demands of work and motherhood. “For me, it was impossible to raise children, earn a living and to be totally present to take photographs,” she reflects. So she chose family and work, storing away negatives that her own loved ones had never seen.
These photographs—taken in the early-to-mid 1970s in Los Angeles and San Francisco—remained in boxes for nearly fifty years until the pandemic’s enforced stillness brought Ramos back to her archive.
Drawn to photography for “the immediacy of its image making results,” Ramos spent her twenties exploring unfamiliar territories with her camera. After moving to San Francisco in 1969 to study at the Art Institute, she photographed the surreal sprawl of the San Fernando Valley where she’d grown up, and the shifting street life of her adopted city. “I think I was somewhat fearless when I took these images,” she notes, and that quality registers in the work: an openness to strangeness, a willingness to approach unknown environments and their inhabitants without predetermined ideas.
What emerges is a document of California in flux—not mythologized landscapes but in-between spaces, overlooked communities, ordinary moments charged with subtle tension or unexpected beauty. Gas stations and street corners, anonymous figures and chance encounters, building an archive that quietly counters more familiar narratives of the era.
These images exist in a curious temporal double exposure: vintage photographs from a specific historical moment, but also newly born objects, printed for the first time from recently digitized negatives. In returning to this work, Ramos has not simply excavated the past but actively brought it into the present, resuming a conversation with photography that was interrupted but never truly abandoned.
Curated by: Melissa Castro Keesor and Katherine Akey