Jesse Hamlin, Chronicle Staff Writer
San Francisco Chronicle
February 22, 2003
Rondal Partridge never knows what's going to grab his eye and trigger a photograph. It might be his own wrinkled fingers, the tendrils of a squash or some "obscene" stretch limo. Perhaps a dead bird, a pair of pregnant sisters, light coming through the bathroom window or his shadow looming over legions of toy dinosaurs at the Oakland flea market. "I don't look for photographs, they look for me," says Partridge, a gleefully irreverent 85-year-old who has been making engaging pictures for 70 years. "They rise up and bite me in the ass!"
About 200 of his wide-ranging and idiosyncratic images are on display in a dual retrospective. The California Historical Society in San Francisco is showing "Quizzical Eye: The California Photography of Rondal Partridge," while the Oakland Museum features "Quizzical Eye: The Personal Photography of Rondal Partridge."
A Bay Area native who grew up among some of America's most esteemed photographers -- his mother was Imogen Cunningham and he apprenticed with Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams -- Partridge can't be pegged. He goes his own way, shifting subject and style as it suits him. "I didn't make these for anybody or for any reason except my own self," says Partridge, a kinetic rail of a man with a mop of white hair. He turned down regular jobs, including an offer to be Look magazine's West Coast staff photographer, so he could make the pictures he wanted. He supported himself, his wife, Elizabeth, and their five kids doing freelance journalism, architectural photos and the occasional wedding.
These pictures range from 1930s images of rodeo cowboys and migrant workers to close-ups of decaying leaves, carnally suggestive chestnuts and abstracted dogs' legs done in the '80s and '90s. There are potent portraits of Lange and Leadbelly; family and friends; and pictures of bay-fill junk heaps, rolling hills and power grids that speak of environmental change and damage. "I did this?" says Partridge with a smile, bouncing into the historical society galleries where his early pictures of field hands and freight-hoppers are on view (he shot some of them for the National Youth Administration).
Nearby hang Manhattan street scenes he photographed while under contract to the big-time Black Star photo agency before serving in World War II as a Navy photographer. "I look at them and I'm amazed," says Partridge, who hadn't seen many of these pictures in years. "Because they're just out of the file. I don't remember them."
The prints at the historical society were chosen by his writer-daughter, Elizabeth Partridge, and UC Irvine art historian Sally Stein. They edited "Quizzical Eye: The Photography of Rondal Partridge," published last month by Heyday Books. The Oakland show was put together by curator Drew Johnson. It includes family and self-portraits, a delightful recent photo-cube puzzle called "Breasts, Bellies and Butts" and the amusing "Another Side of Ansel" from the late '30s, in which the noble master of nature photography leers at the camera like a twisted desperado.
TIME AND IMAGES
"Time changes the meaning of a photograph," Partridge says. "If
you take it and print it and put it away, you got a 50 percent chance
it will get better, and 50 percent chance it will get worse. And you
never know." How do these images strike him now? He looks at his
Depression-era pictures of cotton workers and others and says candidly: "They're
all right. They're not as good as Dorothea's. Not as pointed." He
likes his 1940 "Potato Field Madonna," with her "Oklahoma
hood" and defiant stance. "Everybody accused me of seducing
her visually because she was so young and pretty and didn't belong in
a potato field. I knew she was going to get exploited. I could see that
and photographed the fact that she was going to be exploited."
He credits Lange with teaching him how to look at people. Between Yosemite stints with Adams, Partridge drove her around California as she made her stirring photographs of migrant workers and their families. She fed him, paid him $1 a week and bought his smokes. "Photographs and photographers come and go in a tide of fashion," Partridge says. "I don't think (Richard) Avedon will be remarked on much past another 10 years or so. Ansel will last almost forever because of his sentimental, exclusively polished look. Dorothea might disappear from the public (eye), but as far as illustrating a hawk-eye view of using photography as a language to change other people's notions, she made more marks than anyone."
PASSION IN BLACK AND WHITE
Other than Lewis Hines, who photographed child labor in the early 1900s, "no
one in the 20th century made more acute observations, no one used photography
more insistently" than Lange, he adds. "She had the passion,
she had the fire. She had very little technique. My mother had little
technique. Cartier-Bresson had little technique." Adams "is
quoted over and over (saying) the negative is the score, the print is
the performance. He and Dorothea had an absolute love-hate relationship.
She said when you see a photograph, you shouldn't be looking at the negative
or the print, you should be fighting with what it says, having a dialogue
with it. That's what she taught me." Partridge has enormous respect
and love for Adams, but he couldn't help ribbing the great man in works
like "Pave It and Paint It Green," his famous 1966 photograph
(and film) showing Yosemite's Half Dome behind a car-crammed parking
lot. Adams shot Half Dome many times, "but he never saw the automobiles," Partridge
says. "He always took the picture from here," he adds, blocking
out the cars with his hand. "He thought they were dirty, and he
didn't want to show dirt." They both wanted to get cars out of Yosemite,
but Partridge's way of doing it was to show them.
IDEAL VERSUS REAL
Adams, he says, "idealized everything, to perfection. He photographed
purity. What I saw, I photographed. I made fun of the virginal purity
that he insisted on." Partridge says his mother -- "Imogen,
clearheaded, bright-eyed, sharp- tongued, loved by everyone" --
showed him how to be a self-sufficient photographer on one's own terms, "that
you can do it by yourself, but you have to have a clear view." His
open-eyed view seems boundless.
"I'd go up on the next shuttle if they gave me a camera," he
says.