East/West Gallery presents PAIRED: Imogen Cunningham + Rondal Partridge, featuring the work of Horace Bristol. The exhibit features a rare look at three 20th century California photographers pared down to their most fundamental and personal images, including still lives, nudes and family portraits.

As part of the “Art for Activism” series, 10% of all profits from the exhibition and all proceeds from the screenings will be donated to Focus on the Masters (FOTM) a non-profit art appreciation program that documents, preserves and presents the works and lives of accomplished contemporary artists. Horace Bristol was one of the first artists documented by Focus on the Masters beginning in 1994.

SPECIAL EVENT:
Documentary Screenings and Q&A: Friday, November 30, 2-5PM & 7-10PM
Center Stage Theater, 751 Paseo Nuevo in Santa Barbara
Tickets are limited and only available at the Center Stage Theatre Box Office,
$10 general; $5 students.
Box Office: 805/963-0408
or purchase online through www.CenterStageTheater.org

Screening of Academy Award nominated film Portrait of Imogen and Outta My Light short format documentaries by Meg Partridge, granddaughter of Imogen Cunningham and daughter of Rondal Partridge. Horace Bristol: The Compassionate Eye is a 52 minute film by David Rabinovitch presented by Focus on the Masters & East/West Gallery. Q&A following the screenings.

About the Exhibition….
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.