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Quizzical Eye: The Photography of Rondal Partridge

Elizabeth Partridge and Sally Stein
Foreword by Daniel Dixon

144 pages (10 x 11), with more than 100 b&w duotone photographs
Trade paper, ISBN: 1-890771-57-0, $21.95

A California Historical Society Press book

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 late 1930s, 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.

Reviews:

"Partridge is one of those rare ones who will not be dragged into an ordinary adulthood, and that has made all the difference in his life and in his work. I tip my hat to his extraordinary pictures!"—Wayne Thiebaud

"Visceral, longing, suggestive, disbelieving, paradoxical, and transcendent."—Stacy Blix, Rain Taxi Review of Books

Author Biographies:

Elizabeth Partridge (daughter of Rondal Partridge) is the author of numerous books for adults and children, including Restless Spirit: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange and This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Life and Songs of Woody Guthrie, which was recently nominated for a National Book Award.

Sally Stein teaches art history and visual studies at the University of California, Irvine, and writes about the history of photography in the United States. She is currently at work on her fourth book, a volume of essays on Dorothea Lange.

Daniel Dixon’s writing has appeared in Life, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, House & Garden, and many other magazines. He is the son of Dorothea Lange and the artist Maynard Dixon, about whom he wrote the memoir The Thunderbird Remembered.