In the late eighties I began working on the film, Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life, with my sister Meg Partridge. Dan Ouellette wrote a story on our collaboration which was published in the East Bay Express in January, 1990.

Available Light: Capturing Cunningham and Lange on Film
By Dan Ouellette

Most of us grow up secretly wishing there was someone in our familial pasts that had some claim to fame. A noted novelist or renowned artist or, if we scrape deep enough, perhaps the founding father of some obscure town. Embedded in such wishful thinking is the hope that some valuable genetic matter may have been passed down through the generations. As it is, however, we're more likely to find skeletons in our closets than hidden treasures. Or, even worse, that we come from a long line of very normal, bland and predictable individuals.

Not so Meg and Betsy Partridge, two Berkeley sisters in their late thirties who grew up in the shadows of Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange, two of the most innovative and popular American photographers of this century. Cunningham was their grandmother and her contemporary, Lange, was a godmother of sorts and a close family friend. What was it like growing up in a house filled with museum-bound photography?

Betsy recalls, "Seeing photos was as natural as breathing."

"They were everywhere," Meg adds. "They weren't framed. They were just tacked on the walls. Or stuffed into drawers."

"It never dawned on me until very recently that other people didn't have grandmothers and godmothers like the ones we had," Betsy says. "I had always assumed that our family and our lives were very normal."

She recalls that it was a little strange going into Palmer's Camera Shop years ago and seeing an enormous photo of her grandmother on the wall. But it wasn't until after Cunningham died in 1976 at the age of 93 that she realized how extraordinary her grandmother had been.

Unlike Betsy, who has worked as an acupuncturist since she was 25 ("My parents call me their middle-class daughter"), the younger sister, Meg, was interested in theater and the arts, and she came to recognize the genius of her grandmother much earlier. As a teenager, she worked as a print spotter for Cunningham and witnessed the parade of people who came into her tiny San Francisco apartment every afternoon for tea.

"That's when I first saw how differently other people related to her. I observed people whose major goal in life was to meet Imogen." Still, it wasn't until Meg moved to Arkansas when she was nineteen that she was really struck by the impact Cunningham had on her. "That was the first time in my life where I wasn't surrounded by photos. I came to value her because I experienced a lack of her photos in my life."

Of Cunningham's three sons, only Rondal, Meg and Betsy's father, decided to take up photography. In the 1920's and 30's Cunningham met frequently with a number of West Coast photographers, most notably the "f/64 Group," which included Ansel Adams and Edward Weston and which put on a landmark photo exhibit at the De Young Museum in 1932.

As a result of Cunningham and Adams' friendship, Rondal apprenticed with Adams when he was fifteen. He later worked for several years with Dorothea Lange, who had moved to Berkeley in the '30s and took up residence at 1163 Euclid Street, where she lived until her death at age seventy in 1965.

"Ron and Dorothea developed a strong, mother-and-son-like bond," Meg explains. "He became part of the Lange family and would go camping in the Sierras with them. When we were children, we spent every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Fourth of July holiday at Dorothea's. She was literally our oldest sister's godmother, but we always considered her our vernacular godmother. With her own grandchildren, we were a part of the pack of kids who always did things together."

According to Betsy, Cunningham and Lange were "friends in a funny way." "They adored one another," she says, "but they had very different aesthetics in their photography. Imogen was a classicist who shot straight photos, a lot of nudes, plant forms, and traditional forward portraits. Dorothea shot from the hip. Imogen called her style 'photographing agony in the streets.'"

"Many of Imogen's photos don't need a setting to be understood," Meg adds. "For example, her Magnolia Blossom photo could have been taken anytime from the 1920's throughout the '50's. Dorothea's work is more time and place bound. I initially thought of her Migrant Mother photo as an icon. But when you see it within the context of the Depression era, you realize how connected to real life it is."

Growing up around both women was a study in contrasts for Betsy and Meg. Cunningham wasn't into rituals the way Lange was. As children, the sisters remember spending their grandmother's birthday with her, but major holidays were spent with Lange, who went all out to make the occasions orchestrated celebrations. Betsy and Meg remember one Thanksgiving when they dressed up as Pilgrims. Other holidays were celebrated less theatrically, but there was still an unspoken dress code of fancy skirts or long dresses.

On the other hand, it didn't' require a holiday for Cunningham to dress flamboyantly. She often wore capes, caps with flecks of mica on them, and long dresses with peace symbols. Whereas Cunningham's dining room table would always be piled high with papers. Lange kept her house immaculate.

Both Meg and Betsy contend that neither Cunningham nor Lange were feminists even if they have been lauded as such by many in the women's movement. "In the '60's and '70's when the feminist movement was young and very raw, a lot of women immediately tried to idealize Imogen," Betsy explains. "They went to her house and wanted to make her a symbol for the movement. They asked a lot of questions, such as, "What was more important to you, a career or your family?" She was offended. She saw the two as inseparable. For her, liberation meant that she could get up in the morning and work. Work was liberation."

As for Lange, Betsy points out that she died in the mid-'60's, before there really was a feminist movement to take notice of her. But she thinks Lange's reaction would probably have been similar to Cunningham's. "She saw herself as a woman doing a job. She happened to work in a field where there weren't very many women. As a matter of fact, in her first job as a photographer, she was told to do typing instead. But she didn't let that deter her."Betsy notes that Lange did pay close attention to women in her photographs and that she acknowledged the growing power of women as an important social development.

"Both Imogen and Dorothea are inspirational," Betsy says. "I find it amazing that I've had these two remarkable women be a part of my life. I really understand how both men and women would want to have a piece of Imogen or Dorothea rub off on them. Just in the last couple of years I've noticed what a gift their photography has been to me. I've been given such a wide open way of seeing the world that I've discovered a sense of ecstasy in seeing things of beauty. Just looking a something as simple as sunlight at a certain angle or the shades of twilight knocks my socks off."

So what do you do when you've inherited such a gift? According to the Partridge sisters, you return the favor with a special thank you. But how? In the early '80's Meg made an interesting discovery when she was rummaging around her father's workroom one day. "I found eight hour's worth of archival audio tapes of my dad interviewing Imogen. I was struck by how immediate and personal her responses were related to specific photos she had taken and photography in general. I was just beginning to study film at the time, and I thoughtt o myself what a wonderful film her photos with voice-over could be."

Though her work as a free-lance cinematographer in subsequent years, Meg set the groundwork for producing a film on Cunningham, and in 1985, while working as a film lecturer at San Francisco State University, Meg began to put together what was to became the 28-minute documentary, Portrait of Imogen.

With the help of screenwriter Nancy Hale, a script was made from the interviews and a sound track was developed. Meg's familiarity with Cunningham's work as her apprentice print spotter and later as her print archivist enabled her to easily match more than 250 of Cunningham's black and white photos with the dialogue. The result is an exquisite film that chronicles the 75-year career of Cunningham, ranging from her early self-portraits and nudes to her portraits of nonagenarians taken in the last few years of her life. While three other films were made about her during her lifetime, including Never Give Up, Imogen Cunningham, which captures the peppery 93-year old photographer on film, none gives as intimate a picture of her as does this posthumous portrait.

The viewer is not only treated to a variety of photographic subject matter (lots of family portraits as well as several shots of renowned dancers, including Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham, and Hollywood stars Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant, shot for Vanity Fair magazine), but also to an intimate, witty, and very opinionated "conversation" with her about her work.

The filming of Portrait of Imogen was a bare-bones project. The budget was $12,000 and was funded by Meg from her free-lance work as a cinematographer. "The grant process for the film was very simple," she quips. "There was none." The film won a number of awards and toured Germany with an exhibition of Cunningham's works. Most remarkably, considering it was a first film. Portrait received an Oscar nomination for best documentary of 1988.

The film is now available on videotape and Meg figures she is finally breaking even on the project. There are the obvious museum and gallery markets, but the film also finds use among are therapists, gerontologists, and schoolteachers. It even played at a national American Psychiatry Association Conference.

"I made the film for one specific reason, as a tribute to my grandmother," Meg explains. "It was very personal for me, but I'm seeing how personal it has been for others too."

But this wasn't to be Meg's last foray into film making either. When she was receiving an award for Portrait of Imogen, she was asked what her next project was going to be. Off the top of her head, she replied, "Dorothea Lange."

Enter older sister Betsy. Thrilled by Meg's film on Imogen and the prospects of a documentary on Dorothea, Betsy causally volunteered to help one day. Meg warned her that filmmaking is "95 percent grunt work." "She said she still wanted to help, so I thought, "Great a sucker is born every minute." It looks easy on the outside. "I jumped into the Imogen film thinking it was going to be a piece of cake. I had all the material for it right at my fingertips and it was still a long, laborious process. The next film is going to be enormously different. It will be longer and larger in scope. It will be as much documentary of the times as of Dorothea's photos."

While Meg has been tracking down the archival film footage of San Francisco in the '30's, the dust bowl Depression years, and the postwar urbanization of rural areas in California, Betsy has been hustling grants from private investors. and the California Council for the Humanities. Since both knew Lange, they're collaborating on what shape the film will take.

"Most people are only familiar with Dorothea's Depression photography," Betsy says. "But she took photos on a variety of subjects. We discovered in the Bancroft Library at UC an amazing collection of her photography on the Japanese-American relocation and incarceration during World War II."

"She was really the first photojournalist," Meg adds. "She's done a lot of work that people don't know about. At the end of her life, she became a wonderful philosopher about her work. She saw photography as an important educational resource for observing the changing lives of Americans, especially related to how rural land has disappeared as urban areas have enlarged. She had great insight into the economic and social problems that post war California was to face. I want to explore that visually in the film."

Like Portrait of Imogen, the Lange film is being produced in a makeshift studio in the lower level of the Berkeley house where the Partridge family has lived since 1958. The sisters' parents still live upstairs where Ron continues to pursue his photography career. "He's an excellent photographer in his own right," Betsy says, "He was a freelance photographer for years, and he also did a lot of work for Look Magazine. But he's the pure artist type who doesn't have much business sense at all."

Meg agrees. "He develops a print, takes it out of the darkroom, and then he's done with it. There are piles of photos all over the house. He never shows them except when someone prods him. Then he'll do and occasional exhibit."

Are we talking about the subject of a future Partridge film? "He is the only person alive who knew well the four great California Photographers, Dorothea, Imogen, Adams and Weston," Betsy points out. "Plus, we've come to recognize how much his style has been influenced by both Imogen and Dorothea. His photos have the grittiness of Dorothea's work and the sense of art and beauty of Imogen's. I'd love to do a film on him. The Lange film is so personal and such a project of love. It would be even more personal to make a film on Ron's work. It would also be nice for a change to thank someone so close while they're still alive."