Quizzical Eye

The Photography of Rondal Partridge

de Elizabeth Partridge

The work of eighty-five-year-old photographer Rondal Partridge will be celebrated by the California Historical Society and the Oakland Museum of California this year in two simultaneous exhibitions. Son of the renowned photographer Imogen Cunningham, Rondal began helping his mother with her work at the age of five. At seventeen he became Dorothea Lange's apprentice, driving her up and down the back roads of California as she created her now-famous images of migrant farm laborers. Partridge also worked for Ansel Adams in the 1940s, and it was his photograph of Adams that advertised the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's Ansel Adams at 100 exhibition. Partridge's work has appeared in Audubon, Life, Fortune, and Scientific American for some sixty years. Intimately associated with the great photographers of his time, Partridge has absorbed all the techniques his famous teachers could give him, yet he wears this professional lineage lightly, dedicating himself to following the paths down which his own strange genius leads him. Quizzical Eye: The Photography of Rondal Partridge is filled with breathtakingly intimate portraits, devastating environmental statements, compositional wonders, and telling moments from six decades of American history -- the essential works of a man who has dedicated his long life to capturing single moments on film.