--- title: "A 1981 Lowrider Photo Show Came Back to the Mission. One of Its Subjects Came With It." description: "Otra Onda/Otra Vez reunited a groundbreaking 1981 lowrider exhibition at Acción Latina, and a Mission resident showed up to stand next to the portrait taken of him at 15. A look at how photographs hold a community together, here and in places that look nothing like it." date: "2026-09-18" author: "GetCameraGuard Team" category: "photography-culture" related: - hamburger-eyes-25-years-sf-photo-zine - sf-camerawork-closed-reopened-work-on-the-walls - what-is-paris-photo-photography-fair-guide - vintage-film-camera-agreed-value-insurance image: "/images/photography-gallery-framed-prints-on-walls.jpg" imageAlt: "Framed black and white photographs lit on the grey walls of a gallery, reflected in a polished concrete floor" --- On August 14, more than 300 people crowded into Acción Latina's Juan R. Fuentes Gallery on 24th Street for the opening of *Otra Onda/Otra Vez*, with seven lowriders from the San Francisco Lowrider Council parked outside. Somewhere in that crowd, [as El Tecolote reported](https://eltecolote.org/content/en/otra-onda-otra-vez/), a Mission resident named Jamir Nathan found the wall where his own face was hanging: > "Mission resident Jamir Nathan poses in front of a portrait of himself taken when he was 15 years old, during the opening of the exhibition Otra Onda/Otra Vez at Acción Latina's Juan R. Fuentes Gallery in San Francisco, California, on Aug. 14, 2026, four and a half decades after the original 1981 image." That is the whole argument for community photography in one caption. Somebody pointed a camera at a teenager on a San Francisco street in 1981, and forty-five years later that teenager, now a man, stood in a room full of neighbors looking at himself. **The short version:** - **The show runs through October 17** at the Juan R. Fuentes Gallery, 2958 24th Street, part of Acción Latina. - **It revives *Otra Onda*, a 1981 exhibition** curated by René Yañez at Galería de la Raza, which [48 Hills describes](https://48hills.org/2026/08/big-week-cat-video-fest-deaf-dance-fest-dj-dan-tribute-oakland-pride/) as the first of its kind to put lowrider culture in a gallery. - **Roughly 50 framed portraits** hang in the revival, with El Tecolote naming Joe Ramos, Lou Dematteis, Gato Rivera, Yolanda López, Gustavo Vásquez and Wilfredo Castaño among the photographers. - **The 1981 show and the SF Lowrider Council were born the same year**, in the middle of a police campaign against lowriding. - **The same mechanism shows up far from the Mission**, in a crowdsourced Appalachian archive and in a photocopied San Francisco zine. ## What "Otra Onda/Otra Vez" Actually Is It is a restaging of a 1981 exhibition, mounted 45 years later in a different gallery, four blocks from where the original hung. The title translates roughly to "another wave, again," and the "again" is the point. The original *Otra Onda* was organized by the Mission arts figure René Yañez at Galería de la Raza, and 48 Hills calls it "the first of its kind to document lowrider culture in a gallery or museum setting." Photographers Lou Dematteis, Joe Ramos and Gato Rivera pulled the revival together, reuniting original photographs from the 1981 show so that, in the listing's words, a new generation gets "the chance to see it from a different angle in history." El Tecolote counted about 50 framed portraits on the walls and named six of the photographers whose work appears. The opening had poetry from former San Francisco Poet Laureate Alejandro Murguía and a set from DJ Gabriel Muñoz, who goes by OG SpaceCholo. It closes October 17 with a second reception. The detail that matters most is the one on the curb. Roberto Hernandez, founder and president of the San Francisco Lowrider Council, recruited seven car owners to park on 24th Street for the night, which put the 1981 prints and the living version of the thing they photographed within about thirty feet of each other. ## Why a Lowrider Show in 1981 Was a Political Act Because at the time, the city was treating lowriding as a crime rather than a culture. Hernandez founded the Lowrider Council in 1981, the same year as the original exhibition, and it did not come out of nowhere. Talking to CBS News in 2021, [around an earlier lowrider exhibit](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/san-francisco-latino-lowrider-exhibit/) at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, he said he was arrested 113 times for riding in his 1964 Chevy and eventually filed a federal suit over how he was treated. > "Lowriding was labeled as bad boy behavior. We were stereotyped." That is the context a gallery wall changes. When the dominant images of a community are booking photos and news footage of traffic stops, hanging fifty careful portraits in a gallery is not decoration. It is a counter-file. Hernandez put the payoff plainly in that same 2021 interview, describing how the perception eventually shifted: > "We've become role models for other people in our community because we are human beings and we got it, we got heart, we got soul, we got spirits." Four and a half decades later the cars are in car commercials and on the Golden Gate Bridge for anniversaries, and the photographs made when that was unimaginable are the evidence of what it cost to get there. ## The Photograph Outlasts the Night It Was Taken This is the part photographers underrate: the value of a community photograph is mostly deferred. On the night it is made, a portrait of a 15-year-old next to his car is a nice picture. Forty-five years later it is the only surviving record of a specific person, a specific paint job, a specific block, at a moment nobody thought to archive. Nathan standing in front of his own teenage face is the return on a shutter click from 1981. Nobody in that room in 1981 knew which frames would matter. The photographers just kept shooting people they knew, on a street they lived on, and the sorting happened later. Which is the practical lesson. You cannot identify the important photograph at the time you take it, so the strategy that works is volume, names, and dates. The frames that turn out to matter are almost never the dramatic ones. They are the ones with a face, a car, a storefront and a year attached. ## The Same Thing Happens in Appalachia A community 2,400 miles away built the same counter-file, for the same reason, using crowdsourcing instead of a gallery. In 2014, the photographer Roger May launched [Looking at Appalachia](https://seeingappalachia.org/overview), now called Seeing Appalachia, as a direct response to the War on Poverty photographs of the 1960s. His diagnosis of the problem is nearly word for word Hernandez's: > "Many of the War on Poverty photographs, whether intentional or not, became a visual definition of Appalachia. These images have often drawn from the poorest areas and people to gain support for the intended cause, but unjustly came to represent the entirety of the region while simultaneously perpetuating stereotypes." The fix was structural. Rather than commission one photographer with a thesis, May opened submissions to photographers living in the region, year round, building what the project describes as an archive "defined by its people as opposed to political legislation." Different community, different decade, no cars. Identical mechanism: the people being described take over the describing. A gallery on 24th Street and a submissions form open every January through December are two delivery systems for the same idea. ## And in a Photocopied Zine Off Mission Street Take politics out of it entirely and the mechanism still holds. [Hamburger Eyes](/blog/hamburger-eyes-25-years-sf-photo-zine) started in San Francisco in 2001 as a black-and-white photo zine, and turned 25 this year with a book drawing on 161 photographers out of a back catalog of more than 250 titles. There is no injustice being corrected here and no historical record being reclaimed. It is just a zine with an open submissions box. But it produces the same thing: a large, messy, collectively authored picture of a scene, made by the people in it, accumulating year after year until it becomes a record nobody set out to create. The scene is street photographers rather than car clubs, and the wall is a photocopier rather than a gallery, and it works anyway. That is the case for saying photographs connect a community regardless of which community it is. Lowriders in the Mission, families in West Virginia, and strangers shooting Tri-X on Market Street have nothing in common except the thing that happens when somebody in the group keeps photographing the group. ## If You Are the One Holding the Camera Photograph the scene you are already in, and then do the unglamorous work that makes the pictures usable in forty years. - **Caption with names, dates and places.** An uncaptioned negative is a nice picture. A captioned one is a record. The El Tecolote caption is doing more historical work than most of the images it sits under. - **Give the files back.** The people in the frame are the reason it exists, and prints in their hands survive in ways a hard drive does not. - **Shoot the ordinary nights.** The parade gets photographed by everyone. The Tuesday in the parking lot gets photographed by nobody, and that is the frame that is irreplaceable later. - **Keep the archive somewhere it can outlive you.** Two copies, one off site, and a folder structure a stranger could navigate. *Otra Onda/Otra Vez* only exists because 1981's prints survived 45 years. - **Show the work locally.** Gallery, library, zine, or taped to a wall at a car show. A photograph nobody in the community sees is not connecting anything. *Otra Onda/Otra Vez* is at the Juan R. Fuentes Gallery, 2958 24th Street, through October 17.