Rondal Partridge, noted black-and-white photographer, dies
Rondal Partridge, a well-known black-and-white California photographer influenced by his early work with famed photographers Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange, died June 19 at his home in Oakland of complications of old age.
Mr. Partridge, the son of San Francisco photographer Imogen Cunningham and etcher Roi Partridge, learned his art at an early age helping his mother in the darkroom and went on to have a long career in photography and filmmaking.
When you are around people always noticing the light, interesting things ... you’re just taught to be observant by being exposed to them and their ideas.
Working for just a dollar a day, he packed her camera bags, developed her film in the darkroom and drove her throughout the back roads of California as she documented the effects of the Great Depression.
Mr. Partridge later worked as a photojournalist for Black Star Agency in New York City and for U.S. Navy Intelligence during WWII.
In 1941, shortly before joining the Navy, he married Elizabeth Woolpert, who graduated from UC Berkeley’s law school and later worked as an attorney representing low-income people, his wife’s namesake daughter said.
“We drove all the way to New York, bouncing in the back and camping on the way, and drove back,” she said, returning, she added, after the school year had already started.
Mr. Partridge worked as a freelance photographer, and the photos he took appeared in such major magazines as Look, Life, Audubon, Fortune, Sunset, Colliers, Scientific American and in most architectural magazines.
In 1965, he made a documentary film, “Pave It and Paint It Green,” which chronicled the human congestion and pollution in the Yosemite Valley.