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East/West Gallery is pleased to announce PAIRED , featuring the work of Imogen Cunningham, Rondal Partridge, and Horace Bristol
Santa Barbara's East/West gallery will feature the work of three of California's renowned photographers who worked for a brief time together in the 1930's as colleagues, friends and family.
Imogen Cunningham, a member of famed group f/64 and a pioneer photographer, took the medium from its pictorialist beginnings into its own art form, and worked tirelessly for over 75 years, from the 1900's through the mid 70's bringing photography recognition as a legitimate art form. As a working mother of three including two twin boys, she had "one hand in the dishpan, the other in the darkroom," she was quoted as saying about her career as photographer and her life as a homemaker.
Rondal Partridge, one of the twin boys, began helping his mother in the lab from the age of five. As a teenager, he worked as Dorothea Lange's apprentice driving her up and down the back roads of California as she photographed the now iconic images of migrant laborers. Closely associated with some of the great photographers of the 20th century, among them Lange, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and Horace Bristol, Partridge continues to display his own photographic take on the world around him, focusing his "Quizzical Eye" (the title of his most recent monograph) on his intimate surroundings and contemporary California history.
Horace Bristol described Cunningham as a mentor and a friend and Partridge as a confidant and colleague. He spent his early years as a photographer influenced by the likes of Cunningham, Adams, Weston, and Lange. Lange in particular played an important role in his development as a journalist and in capturing intimate moments in the grand sweep of history. As one of LIFE's original staff photographers, Bristol's images of migrant laborers, inspired by Lange's visits to similar camps, were taken with the accompaniment of a young writer by the name of John Steinbeck, who would later base his seminal novel The Grapes of Wrath on the characters he met on their journeys together to California's Central Valley.
He later went on to work with legendary photographer Edward Steichen in the US Navy during WWII, and then settled in Japan to form East-West a photographic agency aimed at documenting the post-war reconstruction of South-East Asia. His career would take an abrupt and painful halt with the death of his wife. Distraught, he destroyed many of his negatives and prints, effectively ending his photographic career. It was not until nearly 30 years later that his work would again be uncovered and shown in public.
This exhibition focuses on these three artists and their shared appreciation for the simplicity of form and composition as expression in art, and on the beauty captured by these very different photographers who shared one thing, the skill and desire to capture moments we most often relegate to memory.
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