Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Photography, public art
Website: ronmsaunders.com
Ron Moultrie Saunders (b. 1957) is a San Francisco-based photographic artist, landscape architect, and educator. Born in Jamaica, Queens, New York, he relocated to San Francisco in 1982 following graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a Master of Landscape Architecture (1982) and a Bachelor of Arts in Design of the Environment (1979). He has lived in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco since 1985 and maintains a studio at the Minnesota Street Project in the Dogpatch district.
Saunders deepened his photographic practice through workshops with celebrated photographers including Ruth Bernhard at UC San Francisco (1998), Cole Weston in Carmel (2000), Mark Citret in Yosemite (1990), and Frank Espada in San Francisco (2001). He is a co-founding member and Vice Chair of the 3.9 Art Collective, formed alongside Nancy Cato, Rodney Ewing, Sirron Norris, and William Rhodes — a collaborative whose very existence functions as cultural resistance against the declining African American population in San Francisco. He is also a charter member of the Minnesota Street Project Artist Studio Program, and a board advisor to First Exposures.
Saunders has received two Individual Artist Grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission (2017, 2019), a Kala Art Institute Fellowship, and an honorable mention in the UNESCO International World Heritage Photo Competition (1997). His work is held in the San Francisco Arts Commission Civic Art Collection, with major public commissions installed at the Bayview Linda Brooks-Burton Branch Library (2013), Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital (2016), Laguna Honda Hospital, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission Headquarters, and BART stations at Market Street Canopies in San Francisco (2020) and 19th Street Station in Oakland (2019).
Saunders works exclusively in photograms — a 19th-century cameraless process in which objects are placed directly on light-sensitive silver-based photographic paper and exposed to light from a darkroom enlarger. The resulting image is a one-of-a-kind silhouette: each work has no negative and cannot be exactly reproduced. His materials range from botanical specimens (flower petals, seeds, stems) to charged cultural objects such as rope, cotton, and snakeskin, as well as water, salt, and the human figure itself. He has also worked in cyanotype photograms on found papers and surfaces, using his hands and body as symbolic stand-ins for community.
Saunders uses photograms to pursue two intertwined inquiries: humanity’s sensory connection to the natural world, and the personal and collective histories carried in the body. His series The Secret Life of Plants foregrounds the hidden geometries of botanical life, finding what he describes as “a moment of indescribable beauty and magic that exists within us.” His series Beneath My Skin Is The History of My Beauty turns inward, using storytelling and physical artifacts to examine cultural history, family mythology, and the African Diaspora. His 2024 Recology residency series, The Absence of Black Presence, extends this social dimension further — using cyanotype prints on found surfaces and the artist’s own body to confront the systemic erasure and displacement of San Francisco’s Black community, drawing on Ralph Ellison’s concept of invisibility while also reclaiming concealment as a form of cultural resilience.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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