In this theoretical essay written for the magazine Revista Pan, the Colombian photographer Luis B. Ramos rates “Beauty” as the only goal worth pursuing in life. In his opinion, that pursuit should be unfettered by any particular technique, though it should involve the feelings. Aware that photography does not seek creation as such, Ramos believes that photographers must be innovative in their focus and original in their framing, both of which require a “dose of feeling.” Ramos invites readers to take their cameras with them as they roam the Colombian countryside, while “those who have a great deal of theoretical knowledge and a bellyful of other people’s ideas will produce composition after composition, all of them full of hot air and steeped in banalities.”

This essay by Luis Benito Ramos (1899–1955) is an exceptional document in photographic circles because his contemporaries did not, on the whole, express their thoughts on their craft in written form.

Ramos was a painter and a photographer. His early training as a painter taught him to open his eyes and led him to see that photography was not a minor art at all. He came to understand that a photographer must have an adventurous spirit and a discerning eye, and these perceptions formed the basis of the theory of photography that he outlines in this document.  

Ramos went to school in Bogotá and won a scholarship that allowed him to continue his studies in Europe, where he lived from 1928 to 1934. While in Paris he learned the art of photography, which became his alternate career for the rest of his life. He thought of himself mainly as a painter, and worked hard at painting, albeit it to scant critical acclaim (see “Clasicismo, Romanticismo y Academicismo” [Classicism, Romanticism, and Academicism], doc. no. 1089276). His modest success as a painter obliged Ramos to work as a photographer for newspapers in Bogotá, where he published thousands of documentary photographs over the course of his lifetime.