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Rangefinder
Magazine Quizzical Eye by Lou Jacobs Jr.
In 1932 when Ron Partridge was 15, Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston formed a group they named “f/64,” and the first exhibition of their “straight” photography, as opposed to soft-focused and romanticized, was held at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, CA. Ron isn’t certain he saw the show because Imogen was his mother, and the exhibition was “just another show” at the time. Ron’s father, Roi, was an etcher and taught art at Mills College in Oakland, CA. Considering the pervasive influence of fine photography, it’s not surprising that as a teen Ron borrowed a camera from his mother and began taking pictures. He did his own darkroom work, learned from his mother over the years, and sold prints to classmates and neighbors. At age 17 Ron began assisting Dorothea Lange occasionally. She was a stellar photographer for the FSA (Farm Security Administration) who eventually had an enormous positive influence on Ron, as did his mother. All the above information I learned from the lively and lovely book, Quizzical Eye, that displays Ron’s delightful work (Heyday Books, Berkeley, CA, 2003). This is the first collection ever published of the 85-year-old photographer’s images, all black and white. The handsome book offers first-rate examples of intimate portraits, environmental statements, whimsical reportage and a variety of photographs from his life and times. There’s a foreword by Ron’s old friend Daniel Dixon (Lange’s son), an essay by the noted photographic historian Sally Stein and a charming afterward by Elizabeth Partridge (Ron’s daughter). Everyone’s words help illuminate the psyche and style of the veteran Partridge, who in his career has been at home with 35mm, medium and large formats.
When Ron graduated from high school in 1936, for a change of pace he chose to follow the California rodeo circuit to photograph cowboys in and out of action. At season’s end, he returned to Berkeley to assist Lange for a dollar a week including food and cigarette money. The next year he assisted Ansel Adams in Yosemite where Adams had a studio. Elizabeth says that Ron and Adams got along best in the field because Adams wanted things quite precise in the office and darkroom. The next year Adams fired Ron for, let’s say, insubordination. “Though they remained lifelong friends,” says Elizabeth, “[they] never worked together again. Their styles were just too different.” Ron also assisted Horace Bristol, a San Francisco photographer who did magazine assignments and was later one of the original photojournalists for Time/LIFE magazine. By 1940 Ron began doing photo stories through Black Star, still a prominent New York assignment agency today, and he also worked for the NYA, the National Youth Administration in the West. Essayist Stein says she found a “stunningly fresh” set of Ron’s photographs in the NYA archives that showed “remarkable self assurance.” I would guess encouragement from his mother and his years with Lange had contributed strongly to the young man’s confidence and image-making skills. Elizabeth says Ron and Lange had a “rich, complex relationship—part mentor and student, part mother and son, and eventually, part colleagues.”
Lange’s FSA efforts had Ron drive her in search of migrant camps. Elizabeth writes, “At the end of one long day of shooting, Dorothea and Ron pulled into one of [California’s] Central Valley cheap motor courts and went into the office to register. The clerk looked over at Ron, 20 years younger than Dorothea, and his eyebrows shot up. Dorothea glanced at the clerk, then signed the guest books with a flourish: ‘Dorothea Lange and Fancy Man.’” The photographic approaches Ron learned from Adams and Lange were quite different, Elizabeth says. “Ansel likened the negative to a musical score, and he considered the print to be the musical performance: a beautiful, resonant print was his object. Dorothea wanted people to look at one of her photographs and have it hit them in the solar plexus, but the message conveyed by the photograph was all that mattered.” Many of Ron’s images also live up to that same intention. Before Pearl Harbor, Ron married Elizabeth Woolpert, a law student, and joined the Navy as a photographer. Brought up to be independent and sometimes rebellious, qualities Imogen tried to encourage, Ron’s Navy experience was sometimes unpleasant. After the war he was delighted to get back to a life in photography where his role models put great value on “personal and artistic autonomy,” as Stein states. It seems understandable that Ron has gone through life as a genial, empathetic, rugged individualist who took pictures in his own way, which was not always unique, but usually thoughtful. While Stein met Ron late in his life, she attests, “As photography [became] increasingly established as an art form [in the preceding half century, Ron] had sustained a single-minded passion for the medium while inexplicably avoiding the spotlight.”
Stein found Ron gregarious, with an abundance of energy, and he was brimming with stories. In preparation for this book, Ron showed her 1950s family-life pictures, shots of pollution in San Francisco Bay, “portraits of anybody who had wandered into his house and agreed to sit before his antique view camera” and numerous self portraits snapped over seven decades. One such image appears dramatically on the panoramic title pages. More recent close-up pictures “oscillated between the gorgeous and the grotesque,” says Stein, who adds that the loveliest of his pictures are nature studies that show a kinship with his mother’s photography. Some are platinum prints, some seem poetic and many are related to documentary images that help give the book sparkle.
“ Overall,” Stein opines, “the contradictions [in Ron’s subjects and photographic approaches] seemed enormous, but Ron took such pleasure in the jaggedly eclectic whole.” For Stein, and myself as well, it is difficult to place Ron’s work in any one category. Nor are the book’s images all laid out chronologically, which is appealing. Four pages of whimsical self-portraits are followed by a shot of Adams in the Sierra in the late 1930s. Shortly after that is a neat photo of Lange on top of a station wagon about to pull a black cloth over her 4x5 with its long bellows extended. There are also location portraits of Depression-era Californians, in striking FSA style, and a lovely late 1950s view of a hill from Ron’s studio at the time. His wife and five children were often targets for imaginative candids. By 1969 Ron had turned to environmental portraits of artists and others, using both medium format and 35mm. Another occupational specialty was architecture, a few examples of which are in the book, showing his graphic sense of design. There are also examples of assorted power lines, part of a project he photographed for several decades, plus pattern shots of parking lots, an auto junkyard, late 1960s freeway interchanges and ticky-tack Daly City row houses. Further examples of Ron’s artistic documentation include beautiful rolling hills, mud flats, close-ups of tools and a mystery photo of Judy Dater behind an 8x10 with dark slide hiding her face. Ron’s daughters became photogenic subjects, and there’s a thoughtful and elegant portrait of Lange in the early 1960s. While some of Ron’s early photographs are satiric, Stein says his pictures of Lange “consistently express admiration and often awe.” I met her only once at a party where we had time to sit on the floor and chat, and I feel “awe” is quite appropriate.
More images from the book include: a profile portrait
of Imogen right side up and upside down, titled “Queen of Tarts”;
pattern images of shells; sleek close-ups of a dog named Chester; leaves
and
flowers; some artful still lifes—two including dead birds; and
one of the most engaging shots of all—a little girl gleefully reaching
up to pet a dark horse. Lange longed to devote herself to “a visual life,” says Stein, and studying Ron’s archive of photographs gave Stein a sense of what that might mean. She explains of Ron, “This early protégé of Lange treated photography from the outset as a means of exploring all manner of experience in his immediate world.” Early on he had gone to New York to be closer to Black Star, but story assignments reminded him of regimentation, and he hastened back to the still-rural hills behind Berkeley. In 1959 the Partridge family moved to a large home in Berkeley, described by Elizabeth in her anecdotal, nostalgic, revealing Afterward, which includes a family history. She recalls moving from a rural home into a posh Berkeley neighborhood—”four raggedy children, two dogs, a wild assortment of country cats and my father’s three Cadillac limousines… one to run and two to cannibalize for parts.” Other fathers wore suits to work in the city. Her father was around at home, played a “sweet guitar,” and sang when he said good night, then headed for the darkroom where he often stayed until midnight. While Ron photographed buildings for architects during the week, weddings on weekends and portraits when he could squeeze them in, money was “painfully tight.” Elizabeth promised herself never to be self-employed.
Warmly, Stein writes that Ron “readily acknowledges his addition to photography, and he has no desire to wean himself of the daily habit of exposing and developing film and making his now-customary platinum prints. Though he still prowls the flea markets… since the mid-1980s he has made an increasing number of his photographs on a crowded table in one light-filled corner of his spacious living room.” She states that some of Ron’s compositions are classical; some are weird. He shoots flowers in states of decay, and he communes in his mind with Weston, who made exquisite studies of shells and peppers. I knew of Ron Partridge, but his photography was new to me, though I have several hundred photographic books in my library, and it may also be a treat to you. He shoots like a photojournalist but didn’t want to work steadily in that discipline. His black-and-white landscape and close-up work is exemplary. He makes thoughtful portraits and engaging self-portraits. Elizabeth, who knows and admires him as a person and as her father, says that he carries with him the knowledge of outstanding California photographers whose imagery and philosophy rubbed off on him. Now it filters through “his own inimitable sense of being.” Ron and his work are a bridge from the calm past into a more hectic present for the benefit of all who enjoy this book’s collection.Lou Jacobs Jr. is the author of 25 how-to photography books, the latest of which, Photographer’s Lighting Handbook (Amherst Media) was recently published. He has taught at UCLA and Brooks, is a longtime member of ASMP, and enjoys shooting stock during his travels in the U.S. and abroad.
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