Rondal Partridge Offers No Regrets

About His Life or his Photography

He seemed destined to be one of the most famous photographers in the nation. The son of a Mills College art teacher and photographer Imogen Cunningham, his family friends included such legends as Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange, and he worked as an apprentice to Adams and Lange when he was barely out of high school. But by the time the Oakland Museum and California Historical Society put together retrospective exhibits of his photographs, which opened Saturday, they had to ask, "Who is Rondal Partridge, and what's he been up to for 85 years?"

If you don't know Partridge, you may know his photographs: California farmworkers in the fields during the Depression of the 1930s; the East Bay hills in their rolling splendor in the 1950s; Yosemite Valley packed with parked cars in the 1960s; and his most famous photograph of another photographer, Ansel Adams adjusting a Speed Graphic on a tripod in the Sierra in the late 1930s.

It's time to catch up. To begin an interview one morning last week, Partridge settled his lanky frame onto a couch in the Berkeley house where he has lived for more than 40 years. He talked about the careers other people expected him to have. "I am consciously not an icon," he says. "I was exactly what I wanted to be. I've always done what I wanted to do -- with small excursions into cash-related fields." Partridge has taken all kinds of photos in all kinds of places, from the Orinda hills to shipboard in the South Pacific, but he's never been good at taking orders or following assignments that didn't make sense to him. "You can't believe the opportunities I missed -- or didn't take," he says, without a touch of regret.

His remarkable variety of subjects and styles must have confounded editors and curators, but it provides plenty of material for the two "Quizzical Eye" exhibits that opened Saturday in the Bay Area. Partridge's more personal photographs of family, friends and farmworkers, as well as his abstract works, are on display at the Oakland Museum. Rural scenes, architecture and environmental photos are at the California Historical Society in San Francisco.

About 100 of his images are printed in a new book, also titled "Quizzical Eye," written by Partridge's daughter Elizabeth Partridge and curator Sally Stein. It is published by the California Historical Society and Berkeley's Heyday Books. The book and the two exhibits continue the Partridge family's creative explorations: Elizabeth has written about Dorothea Lange and Woody Guthrie and was nominated last fall for a National Book Award. Her sister Meg was nominated for an Academy Award in the 1980s for a documentary on their grandmother Imogen Cunningham. Mills College recently sent on tour an exhibit of prints by Roi Partridge, Rondal's father who was the first director of the college art museum.

As Rondal Partridge describes the life he made for himself -- his jobs, his homes, his nonphilosophy of photography -- he is both wildly animated and precise. Before he began talking about himself, he was sorting through art books on his coffee table, books he proudly describes as Oakland and Concord flea-market finds. Partridge reads the high-flown introduction in one book about photography's "narrative potential." "Writing about photography is the grossest obscenity," he responds. He hasn't done it himself. "Basically, I don't really care," he says, and he's developed his own narrative language. "I did it all my life without understanding it, without codifying it."

Partridge began helping his mother in her darkroom when he was a child, and by the time he was attending Oakland's Fremont High School he was taking pictures of classmates. Ansel Adams suggested that he buy a camera, and with a 35 mm Zeiss Icon he went on photo shoots with his mother. He sold some photos to a local newspaper, and when he applied for a job he remembers this episode: "One of the photographers said, 'If I told you there was an assignation down at the corner, what would you do?' I didn't know what he was talking about." The pros must have thought it was pretty funny -- the kid didn't know the polite term for a romantic tryst. So much for a bohemian existence in an artistic family.

After high school, Partridge traveled with Adams to Yosemite and the Sierra and with Lange to Central Valley farm labor camps. From Lange, whose portraits of ordinary people became classics, he learned how to put subjects at ease and find the truth in the detail. "Her advice on how to document something was not the way newspapers document," he says

Later, he would chafe at magazine assignments to set up so-called "real-life" shots, but he made some memorable images of farmworkers himself for the National Youth Administrations. It was one of Eleanor Roosevelt's favorite programs, he says. Some of those photos caught the attention of a major photo agency, Black Star, and Partridge headed for New York to begin a free-lance commercial career. One project he remembers: stringing Sylvania flashbulbs along four blocks of New York buildings for one promotional shot. That may sound like a chore, but what Partridge disliked most was going to lunch with martini-drinking executives and talking about the philosophy of photography.

Partridge joined the Navy in 1941 and served in Naval Intelligence as a photographer. After World War II he returned to the second of his homes in what was then rural Contra Costa County. The first was on Upper Happy Valley Road; he recalls paying $8,000 for two houses and a barn on 21/2 acres. "But the culture got me," he says. One neighbor complained when Partridge painted his house dark blue. "Another neighbor told me all fences had to be picket fences and had to be white." Partridge packed his family and his equipment over the hill to 12 acres on Bear Creek, surrounded by cattle ranches. The property cost $25,000. "The kids had horses, and there was a creek nearby with big trout in it," Partridge says. "It was heaven." His daughter Elizabeth, in her text for the printed version of "Quizzical Eye," remembers the freedom of the country as well as "a little shack with just two bedrooms, a nearly dry well, and the world's leakiest roof." By the early 1960s, the land was claimed to create Briones Reservoir. That's when the family moved to Berkeley.

Partridge tried his hand at teaching, but that wasn't a suitable long-term career either. "The teachers were ignorant, bombasticboobs who just weren't contributing to the education of children," he says. He didn't like the regimented thinking of the "old boys' club" either. "I don't like poverty, and I've had enough experience with it. But I do like freedom of the mind, freedom of thought."

In the 1950s and '60s he photographed the works of such notable Bay Area architects as John Warneke and landscape architect Thomas Church, but he refused to take lighting equipment to the houses. "I told them it was their job to light and build and plan a house so it can be lived in," he says.

During the 1960s and '70s, Partridge often concentrated on environmental changes to California, such as the "ticky-tacky" houses side by side in Daly City, or the increased tourism in Yosemite, which he depicted in a film, "Pave It and Paint It Green."

Partridge still continues to take pictures, including objects he discovers at flea markets. He says he shot 600 photos a year until he turned his attention to the current museum and gallery exhibits. He has also become a master printer for the Imogen Cunningham Trust.

Partridge was asked if famous photographs by Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange and Edward Weston look any different to him than they do to the rest of us. "There are two kinds of photographs in this world," he says. "One is large, vintage, signed and kowtowed to by generations of sycophants. "Then there's the second kind. Is there any difference between an exquisitely printed photograph on a poster, and an exquisitely printed photograph? If they're under glass, they will both last. One is about 40 bucks and the other about 400 bucks. Why is there a difference? "Mother took photographs so people could enjoy them, not to make a million dollars," he says. "One of my mother's photographs -- magnolia blossoms -- sold for $165,000. I gave one away the week before."