The Seattle Times: Pacific NW 08/06/2006: Out Of The Attic And Into The Light:
IT WAS A STROKE of great fortune for the late photographer Imogen Cunningham and her son, photographer Rondal Partridge, that his daughter inherited their keen sense of observation and talent for visual storytelling.
While Cunningham, who died 30 years ago in San Francisco, and Rondal, who’s 88 and still shooting photos at his home in Berkeley, slummed in artsy coexistence with mid-century contemporaries such as Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams, little “Muggins” was hovering in the background, drinking in her kid’s-eye view of the Bay Area’s high-caliber arts scene.
Those “rather rowdy and entertaining evenings around the dining-room table” also included appearances by San Francisco sculptor Ruth Asawa and her architect husband, Al Lanier, the writer Felix Green, Lange’s husband, Paul Taylor, and the influential architecture critic Allan Temko, who was immortalized in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” as the character Roland Major. The elderly Cunningham would catch a ride across the bay to Berkeley with whomever she could find to drive her.
“It was a wild, pretty wonderful time,” filmmaker Meg Partridge says of her childhood. “You always thought as a kid, ‘This is reality; this is normal.’ ”
Partridge had some clue as a child, but certainly recognized at the start of her film career in the 1980s how extraordinary it was to grow up in the orbit of some of the 20th century’s most celebrated photographers, from her acid-tongued grandma “Imo” to her famously eccentric dad, Rondal, to her fiercely matriarchal godmother, Lange, “the grand dame.”
These were the people who fed Partridge’s mind — strong-willed women and charmingly off-center men, wandering souls with uncannily focused lenses.
Worth reading for insights into the personalities and temperaments of artists, as well as some history.