By
Jean Schiffman
SF Arts Monthly
January 2003
When I ring the doorbell of Rondal Partridge's rambling Berkeley home,
he is about to take a photo. The night before, he'd spotted a discarded
gold foil Ferrand & Rocher candy wrapper in the kitchen and placed
it under the lens of his camera, which is on a rolling apparatus near
the living room window. The floorboards are worn with years of wheeling
to capture various angles of light.
Native San Franciscan Ron Partridge, son of renowned photographer Imogen
Cunningham, first helped his mother develop film at the age of five.
Over the decades his work has appeared in exhibitions and collections,
as well as in major magazines. But he's not a household name, like his
cohorts, who included Ansel Adams, for whom he worked in the 1940s; Dorothea
Lange, with whom he apprenticed for several years starting at age 17;
and Edward Weston.
However, all that may change as of now. His first book of black and
white photos, "Quizzical Eye: The Photography of Rondal Partridge," has
just been published by Heyday Books and CHS Press, edited by one of his
daughters, Elizabeth (Betsy) Partridge (author of the recently published "This
Land Was Made for You and Me: The Life and Music of Woody Guthrie"),
and photo historian Sally Stein. Two exhibits of his work, at the California
Historical Society in San Francisco and the Oakland Museum, open this
month. The man has never sought fame. "In my mother's house," he
explains, "there were so many phonies, incompetent wannabes, blowhards,
and I just didn't want to be in their company." Yet despite his
protestations, he appears to be ready for celebrity's belated arrival.
Partridge peers over half-glasses. He is an imposing figure, with a
shock of gleaming white hair that he occasionally ruffles so that it
stands on end. At 85, he has smooth skin, clear, light blue eyes and
a direct, at times stern, gaze. He wears a white smock and what appears
to be a paisley tie, rigged to function as both belt and suspenders.
An Ansel Adams photography book has been tossed on the sofa where we
sit; the coffee table is stacked high with books and magazines; camerasÑabout
50 of them, he estimatesÑlurk in every nook and cranny. A rooster
crows in the backyard chicken coop; daughter Betsy and other family members,
including a dog, wander about. With its worn furniture, the house bears
testimony to a home in which creativity has always been paramount.
"I am not an artist," Partridge announces. "What I do
is bring to visualization what spelling brings to language. I make looking
at something clear." Proudly eccentric and opinionated, he often
makes bold assertions like these, and sometimes, as Betsy points out,
contradicts them. He is loquacious and charming.
Partridge's photos include landscapes, many of which chronicle his lifelong,
passionate environmental concerns; simple still-lifes, like tools or
fruit, that take on new meaning under his unblinking gaze; people, including
preoccupied family members; animals dead and alive. He eschews glamour,
instead finding inherent beauty in the most humble, workaday scenes and
objects. He never poses people, rarely arranges multiple objects for
special effect and always brings his subjects to the light, not vice
versa. Since 1985 he has preferred to print in platinum rather than silver
for its warmer, more rounded tones, and he mixes his own chemicals. He
photographs every day, never previsualizing before shooting; objects,
figures, scenes, present themselves to him and he obligingly snaps the
shutter.
Now, he flips pages of the new book, pausing at "Pave It and Paint
It Green,1964," in which Half Dome looms ironically above a packed
Yosemite Valley parking lot. "Photography has nothing to do with
composition, it has to do with what's in your head," he declares. "What
I've done is taken the wilderness and the cars, and there's a lesson
in that. Visual language, that's what that is. But I never did it on
purpose. I just did it, without knowing I was doing it." He loves
automobiles and once wanted to be a race-car driver but sees the damage
they're doing to the environment.
His best-known photo is the 1938 "Ansel Adams in the High Sierra," with
the famous photographer seen in profile on a rocky peak with camera on
tripod and snow-covered mountain beyond. Partridge's working relationship
with Adams, with whom he traveled the back roads of California, was rocky,
but Partridge speaks of him admiringly. "I once saw him talking
on the phone about one subject, and at the same time typing an article
about another subject with one finger, at 50 words a minute!" he
says.
"He had two brains! Amazing fellow."
Partridge points to a photo of cracked, tire-strewn landfill in the "East
Bay, Modern Midden," 1965. "This is why I'm not an artist.
This isn't art, this is our environment. This is an [environmental] impact
on the bay." He flips the page, to a recent series, "Shadow
as Substance." Here his own, elongated shadow superimposes itself
upon secondhand wares spread out on the ground. These were taken at one
of his favorite haunts, the flea market. "Sometimes I just like
to observe things. Out of the flea market come photographs of things
that no one else would look at.
"This is Dorothea Lange," he continues, looking at a photo
of his mentor in her old age. "It's the best portrait I ever made.
What I put together was the environment and the person and her sickness
and her strength." He accompanied Lange to the migrant laborers'
camps where she took some of her most famous photos, and took some himself.
One, "Potato Field Madonna," 1940, depicts a saucy young farmworker
in sunbonnet and muddy gloves, her empty future forecast in the shadow
that crosses her face.
He pauses at a picture of his mother ("a very tart personÓ);
at a photo of his and his identical twin brother's hands; at his Stanford-student
son's legs, baggy pants wrinkled from sitting at the computer. "Most
people don't see the minutiae, the details, the wrinkles, the warts,
of things around them. I doÉ
."I'll show you my favorite photograph." In it, Partridge is
reflected in the mirror of a dreary motel room, his wife on the bed beside
him, reading. "You're on the road, there's a television with nothing
onÑyou couldn't get a better definition of Motel 6!"
Of his road kill series, including maybe 50 dead squirrels, he remarks, "Everyone
reads psychological meaning into that, but the fact is, they don't move!" A
defunct bird, inserted tidily upside down into a slender glass, is perhaps
his most famous of that series. "I know people don't like 'em,"
he admits. "I know people are sentimentally distanced from death.
I'm closer to death than you are and it doesn't bother me at all. If
it's a good photograph, whether it's a dead bird or a squashed oyster,
it's the same thing."
I peer through the camera lens at his crinkled foil wrapper. Before
that, a slice of tomato had been positioned there. His wife eventually
threw it out. "It was probably getting rotten," says Partridge,
and notes gleefully, "In the amount of time you've stood there,
I've taken three photographs!" (of the candy wrapper).
Partridge has taken plenty of color shots in his life, especially back
in the 1940s when he was shooting for magazines like Life and Fortune,
before he chucked it all for the independence of a freelancer. He prefers
black and white. "I feel I am at the end of the line of black and
white photographers. You have such a range with black and white, and
you can change that range, make it more contrasty, flatter, this and
that, or you can print on paper that's a little brown. I just detest
color! It's not for me. I find myself representing the old farts of the
world, which is very strange, since I'm a very modern-minded person." We're
at his photo files now. Betsy says she and Stein looked through at least
10,000 archival prints for the book and exhibits. The irascible photographer
himself was allowed only veto power over the editors' selections. "This
is my dog. This is a coin Éa pepperÉ a persimmon É a
tin can É . three seed pods."
He picks up an automatic camera that's lying around, tries to figure
out how to turn it on, then snaps me. There's a whirring sound. "Do
you hear that noise? That's the time between when I took the picture
and this thing focused, two-fifths of a second. And it ruins the photograph,
because when I push the trigger, I'm thinking about what you look like
when I pushed it. The main trouble with these new cameras is that they're
autofocusing."
Of the upcoming exhibits, he says, "I'm fearing the fallout. I've
spent the afternoon talking to you! Ridiculous!" He claims he's
done it to be polite but is dying to get back to work. I smile at Betsy
and say, "I think he enjoyed it." She grins back: "Yeah,
he did."
"Oh, I enjoyed it," confesses Partridge. "I'm like a whore.
If you don't enjoy it, don't go into the business."
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