Luis Benito Ramos (1899−1955) was the first Colombian photographer to engage in photojournalism about a topic of his choosing. He worked at the margins of the daily news, using only a few photographs to address the themes that concerned him. Ramos’s photographs, which were accompanied by short texts, were imbued in a sense of intimacy. Ramos did not pursue headlines, but topics that moved him on a human level and that, thanks to his talent, he could turn into news. As a result, Ramos privileged spontaneous photography of people on the street. This article is one of the first works of photojournalism that Ramos published in Colombia.
In Colombia, Ramos was recognized as a photographer of remarkable talent. He worked as a photojournalist for the weekly Cromos (founded in 1916), where the photographs in this document were published. Ramos was born to a poor family, and his modest background explains the content of his work. After studying easel painting in Bogotá, he went to Paris in 1928 where he wielded the camera to make a living. Eventually, that became his main source of income. Upon returning to Colombia in 1934, he was commissioned to make a mural.
Due more to the themes he addressed than to his political activism, Ramos is considered an emblematic artist of the Bachué movement that dominated the Colombian art scene in the twenties and thirties. That movement drew its inspiration from a piece by Colombian sculptor Rómulo Rozo (1899-1965) entitled Bachué, madre generatriz del pueblo chibcha [Bachué, Mother of the Chibcha People].