A captivating volume that transports us onto the San Francisco streets of the 1970s through the black-and-white images of a previously unknown master of 20th-century photography, Barbara Ramos. "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." —The New York Times Book Review “Ramos’s decision to release A Fearless Eye now, after a 50-year hiatus from photography, is certainly a gift to California and beyond. But it’s especially a gift to those of us who love San Francisco: its streets, its people, its history. Ramos has frozen each of those in time and given us a gorgeous permanent record of this city’s past.” —KQED Unearthed fifty years after they were originally taken, Ramos's photographs offer up stirring scenes from everyday life—a group of Hari Krishnas sing on Market Street, a window dresser changes a mannequin at the Union Square Macy’s, two men lean in for a kiss at a peace rally in Golden Gate Park. A Fearless Eye brings Ramos's images to print for the very first time, introducing audiences to a photographer whose work belongs alongside that of Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, and Vivian Maier. Featuring 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 Stephen A. Heller, this enthralling street photography book is a fascinating time capsule of a bygone moment in California history. FILM PHOTOGRAPHY BOOK: In his profile of Barbara Ramos in Black & White magazine, Stephen A. Heller calls her photographs “startling in their humanity, objectivity, and originality," observing that they "deserve to share center stage with those of Frank, Maier, Arbus, and Friedlander.” A Fearless Eye provides an exciting introduction to this previously unsung talent through a curated selection of Ramos's incredible archival images. REDISCOVERED FEMALE ARTIST: Throughout the early 1970s, Barbara Ramos became obsessed with exploring the world through her camera, but she was forced to switch careers to make a living at the time. The rediscovery of her photographs is now leading to overdue public recognition of her work, including a prominent Black & White magazine profile and an exhibit at the Sanchez Art Center in Pacifica. SAN FRANCISCO HISTORY GEM: This volume celebrates the people and history of San Francisco. It's a charming tribute to the city with a uniquely vintage visual flavor, a must-have for longtime residents and visitors alike. Perfect for: Lovers of vintage, historical, and street photography San Francisco residents, visitors, and armchair historians Museum-goers and fans of such renowned American photographers as Diane Arbus, Vivian Maier, and Robert Frank Fans of Barbara Ramos's unconventional story and unparalleled work

A revealing look at the work and life of an exceptional 20th-century photographer, based on his own archive of photographs and papers John Gutmann (1905-1998) was one of America's most distinctive photographers. Born in Germany where he trained as an artist and art teacher, he fled the Nazis in 1933 and settled in San Francisco, reinventing himself as a photo-reporter. Gutmann captured images of American culture, celebrating signs of a vibrant democracy, however imperfect. His own status as an outsider--a Jew in Germany, a naturalized citizen in the United States--informed his focus on individuals from the Asian-American, African-American, and gay communities, as well as his photography in India, Burma, and China during World War II. This handsome book acknowledges Gutmann's place in the history of photography. Drawing on his archive of photographs and papers at the Center for Creative Photography, it presents both unfamiliar works and little-known contexts for his imagery, linking his photography to his passionate interest in painting and filmmaking, his collections of non-Western art and artifacts, and his pedagogy. In addition to a major essay by Sally Stein, the volume includes an introduction by Douglas R. Nickel, and an overview of the Gutmann archive by Amy Rule. Published in association with the Center for Creative Photography Exhibition Schedule: Center for Creative Photography, Tucson (October 2009 - January 2010) Milwaukee Art Museum (dates tbd) Mapfre Foundation, Madrid06/22/10-09/19/10

The work of eighty-five-year-old photographer Rondal Partridge will be celebrated by the California Historical Society and the Oakland Museum of California this year in two simultaneous exhibitions. Son of the renowned photographer Imogen Cunningham, Rondal began helping his mother with her work at the age of five. At seventeen he became Dorothea Lange's apprentice, driving her up and down the back roads of California as she created her now-famous images of migrant farm laborers. Partridge also worked for Ansel Adams in the 1940s, and it was his photograph of Adams that advertised the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's Ansel Adams at 100 exhibition. Partridge's work has appeared in Audubon, Life, Fortune, and Scientific American for some sixty years.Intimately associated with the great photographers of his time, Partridge has absorbed all the techniques his famous teachers could give him, yet he wears this professional lineage lightly, dedicating himself to following the paths down which his own strange genius leads him.Quizzical Eye: The Photography of Rondal Partridge is filled with breathtakingly intimate portraits, devastating environmental statements, compositional wonders, and telling moments from six decades of American history -- the essential works of a man who has dedicated his long life to capturing single moments on film.

"Published on the occasion of the exhibition Zoe Strauss: 10 Years, Philadelphia Museum of Art, January 14-April 22, 2012."

Since the late 1960s, photographer Ken Ohara has concentrated his efforts on expanding the limited conventions for the human portrait. At the age of twenty, Ohara moved from Tokyo to New York in 1962. Eight years later he published his extraordinary first book ONE, which consisted of a series of uniformly tight close-ups of a multitude of diverse faces that he photographed on the streets of New York. A portion of this project was first exhibited at MoMA in 1974 in New York. Over the next thirty years, Ohara has continued his portrait studies, all the while exploring a variety of means to alter the interaction between photographer, subject, and the resulting portrait image. This retrospective book and exhibition considers for the first time Ohara's seven major projects that systematically explore a variety of elements that shape and reshape the possibilities of photographic portraiture. Ohara's series present striking results from his different approaches to defining the character of the portrait transaction - ranging from radical close-ups of hundreds of anonymous faces, to one extended self-portrait comprised of the photographer's self-exposure made every minute for a period of 24 hours, to journals composed systematically of one view looking outward and a second view including the photographer's image for each day of a year that the photographer compiled in the compressed format of the leporello or folded book. Also included in this retrospective are a collaborative series of photographs made by others for Ohara, and a more recent series of 100 portraits in which each "sitting" was deliberately designed to register the subject's dynamic contribution by lasting an hour. As photographic historian and guest curator Sally Stein proposes, in its rigorously varied breadth the work of Ken Ohara not only offers one of the most sustained examinations of space and time in photographic portraiture but also provokes a rethinking of the conventional limits of photographic depiction. Co-published with Museum Folkwang, Essen.

Sally Stein has long investigated the role of photography in relation to broader questions of culture and society. This first collection of her selected essays, Close-ups from Afar, brings together essential writings from over five decades, cumulatively demonstrating Stein?s distinctive critical approach to the history and proliferation of photography and its role within mass media and contemporary culture. In this richly illustrated volume, Stein turns her astute eye to diverse topics including the rise of colour photography, the place of California in the history of the medium?s development, and women and photography between feminism?s ?waves?, as well as insightful considerations of a host of photographers from Jacob Riis to Helmut Newton, Ansel Adams to Dorothea Lange, Susan Meiselas to Dawoud Bey. She has consistently sought to challenge readers to think afresh about the social uses of photography and their broader contexts and far-reaching effects.