Background
Rondal Partridge was born on September 4, 1917, in San Francisco, California, United States. He had a twin brother named Padraic. His parents were etcher Roi Partridge and photographer Imogen Cunningham. He grew up in a household where he was constantly exposed to the influence of several great California artists of the early 20th century. For example, at the age of four, Rondal Partridge spent time staying at the home of photographer Dorothea Lange and her husband, painter Maynard Dixon. He became so close to Lange that their relationship was often compared to a son's relationship with his mother.
Education
Rondal Partridge began assisting his mother in her darkroom when he was five years old. At the age of 16, he became photographic assistant to Dorothea Lange, when she got a job taking pictures documenting rural poverty for the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal agency of the U.S. government. Lange paid Rondal Partridge one dollar a day plus expenses to be her driver and darkroom assistant, and he often spent the night outdoors in a sleeping bag while she slept in a bed in a motel. Lange was paid four dollars a day.
Rondal Partridge studied at California State University in 1938, at the Cornish School of Music (now Cornish College of the Arts), Seattle, in 1947, and at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1951.
Career
From 1937 to 1939, Rondal Partridge worked as an assistant to Ansel Adams in Yosemite National Park. He operated Adams' new automated darkroom in Yosemite Village, which produced photographic prints of Adams' work for sale to tourists. In July 1937, Edward Weston, who had received a one-year Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph the American West, arrived in Yosemite. Adams had organized an excursion to the High Sierra, hiring three mules at Red's Meadow to take the party to the Minarets and Devils Postpile National Monument. Rondal Partridge accompanied and assisted the party. After a week of taking photos, the group returned to Yosemite Valley late at night on July 27. As they were eating a dinner of roast chicken, they learned that Adams' new darkroom in an adjacent building was on fire. Rondal Partridge and others battled the flames until the fire was extinguished. Although thousands of negatives were lost, many masterpieces were saved. The fire had been caused by negligence by a photo technician sent by the Zeiss camera company.
In 1940, Rondal Partridge got a job with a New Deal agency called the National Youth Administration, documenting the problems faced by young people in the final years of the Great Depression. Later in the year, Ron accepted an offer from the photography agency Black Star in New York, as an assignment photographer.
After 4 years in the U.S. Navy as a photographer, Rondal Partridge worked as a freelance photographer on the West Coast for architects creating residences and commercial spaces in the new Mid-Century Modernism Style. He worked for architects Joseph Eichler, Tommy Church, Don Olsen, Mario Ciampi, as well as Le Corbusier.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Rondal Partridge also worked as a filmmaker, making films on subjects as varied as painter Wayne Thiebaut, Yosemite Valley (Pave It and Paint it Green), and education, (They're Your Kids), as well as a multi-media presentation at the Oakland Museum, titled The Water Movie.
In addition to freelance photography, Rondal Partridge accepted positions to teach film and photography at the San Francisco Art Institute, the University of California at Santa Barbara and California State University at Hayward in the 1970s.
Rondal Partridge and Elizabeth managed the Imogen Cunningham Trust beginning in 1980, for the next two and a half decades. During this time he printed contemporary platinum and silver gelatin prints for the Cunningham Trust.
Rondal Partridge died on June 19, 2015, at the age of 97.
