Road Tripping with my dad: Santa Barbara or bust

It's always an adventure hitting the road with my dad.
There are coffee and tea stops. Old friends to visit. Interesting things to photograph. "You see all these plastic bags blowing around? It makes a statement. You gotta have two things to make a good photograph. A field, and garbage. That's it." My cousni, Reeve Woolpert (on left) and his photo opening. "Best show I've ever seen." Great Mexican food, a crappy hotel, and home at the end of two long, wonderful days.

Award lists, and behind the scenes with photographer Plaxton

This time of year thoughtful, enthusiastic "best books of the year" lists are compiled by hard-working librarians,  reviewers, and readers. Marching for Freedom has made the cut on Kirkus Best YA Books of 2009, Hornbook,  Publisher's Weekly Best Children's Books of 2009, Booklist Editor's Choice, School Library Journal, NYPL Top 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing. I am incredibly stoked and honored to be in the company of such terrific books.

Sometimes I forget how incredible the internet is, and then something like this reminds me: here's a New Yorker portfolio of portraits of world leaders, by photographer Platon, with his comments. You get to look at each photo, up close, and hear his story of taking the shot while he was set up in a hallway at the September meeting of the United Nations. Start with the photo of Platon in the lower right corner and listen to the interview of how the whole shoot went, and then click on the images to hear his specific comments. It's amazing how difficult the shoot was, how hard he worked, and how revealing the photos are.

Here's my favorite: Evo Morales, President of Bolivia. It's a gorgeous, gorgeous photograph.

Book designers: unsung heros of my world

One of the biggest thrills for me in illustrating non-fiction books with photos is finding little-known  or never published photos, and seeing what parts of the story the photos can carry. I can get seriously euphoric over finding beautiful, revealing photos. For my new book, Marching for Freedom, I found two photographers, Matt Herron and John F. Phillips, who had done incredible photos of the Selma to Montgomery march for the vote in 1965. They were both awesome about letting me look through their archives.

So now picture this: I have a manuscript in pretty good shape, thanks to the hard work of my editor, Catherine Frank at Viking.. I have lots of photos from the two photographers, and many others I've uncovered. I am also getting pretty tired at this point in the process. I am losing traction as we begin the rush to meet our deadline.

Enter Jim Hoover, brilliant designer. He scoops up all my photos, reads and rereads the manuscript, begins sorting out which photos are the very best. We talk. We shoot messages back and forth. Jim lays out the pages. We try one photo then another. Jim finds photos. More talking and emailing. Catherine runs back and forth from her office to Jim's to weight in, provide fresh eyes. The shape of the book begins to emerge. Jim begs the powers that be for more pages, so that the book will have breathing room for the photos. He gets an okay, we slip in more photos, agonize over what we can't include. Jim chooses paper, tries different fonts, finds a spot for one last photo.

We wrap the whole thing up. Jim pushes some sort of magic electronic button and the book heads off for printing. I collapse on my bed for about two weeks. Jim gets on with his other work that's been stacking up.

So six months later the book gets reviewed in time for the pub date, October 15. I was just sent a copy of the Hornbook review. Here is my favorite part: "Partridge once again demonstrates why she is almost peerless in her photo selection. The photographs have a moral impact as well as a visual one: the stirring cover depicting two high school students, one with an American flag draped over his shoulder, the other with the word VOTE written on his forehead; a four-image sequence in which a young boy is confronted and arrested for holding up a voting rights sign; black men filling out applications to vote in front of a sign enumerating the offensively ridiculous obstacles placed in their way."

Of course I love being "almost peerless" in my photo selection!  But I have to say, take a bow Jim Hoover, peerless book designer.

Manuscript into copy editor!!

It's a sheer pleasure to turn in a manuscript and have it go to copy editing. I know I've wrung every creative drop out of myself that I can, and it is someone else's turn to buff it up. Now I'm working on gathering photos with the designer. I just keep sending the amazing, wonderful photos I find, knowing he will be able to make sense of them, culling out the ones that aren't the best, alighting on ones I'd casually included, but thought were unimportant. (Note the theme here: someone else is hard at work on "my" book! This is actually true all the way along -- the editor has been hard at work, especially the last few months as we passed versions back and forth via email.)

I just had one of those lovely "ah-ha" moments where I discovered a great theme that I can weave into the book, mostly via the images. This makes me very excited. Because images can be so evocative, kids will get a feeling for this theme, a gut level reaction, and it will give them something to think/feel about. More on the details anon.

Meanwhile, I'm home with my cats, who want to lay across the keyboard, and be fed, not necessarily in that order. That's Coyote, un-creatively named for the coyote trap that caught her by the back leg and skinned off her fur when she was a barn cat long ago, before she was rescued by my sister, taken in by me, and mended by her own resilience. (The skin grew back, top to bottom, then the fur came in, top to bottom, except for a thin band around her ankle of shiny scar tissue where she just couldn't make fur anymore). She's a very sweet cat, big on eye contact with her tall, clumsy human companions, and not above an occasional swat at Blackberry, her neer-do-well son, whose tail you see above.

Hayward Historical Society, Ron Partridge photo show, "From the Byways to the Highways"

We had a blast. Despite huge changes in Hayward, my dad was able to get me to the Historical Society Building. He's one of those people who can still remember how things looked years ago and run a commentary on all the changes. I was hoping we'd pass Eddie Badiati's place, but we didn't. (This guy is legendary in my dad's mind for hot dipping all parts of his car's engine in chrome when they were teenagers and cars were God.)

The evening was terrific. Great group of enthusiastic people showed up, and my dad was funny, encouraging and inspiring. Thanks to Jeanine Sidran, Education Director, and all her crew, and the board members who made our evening.

Pictures of the evening say it best: (first photo by me, second Jeanine Sidran, and last three by Thomas Taylor. Thanks for sending them to me!)

Hayward Historical Society, watch me wrangle my dad, roughly equivalent to wranging a dozen cats!

Off to speak at the Hayward Historical Society tonight. They have the traveling exhibition of my dad's photographs, From the Byways to the Highways, which I curated from two shows we did a couple years ago. One of them, at the California Historical Society, I co-curated with Sally Stein, the other, at the Oakland Museum, was curated by Drew Johnson.

CERA, California Exhibition Resources Alliance, travels shows to small California museums for a moderate price they can afford. They do really cool stuff. I especially love their photography exhibits. Great photos that have to do with California history or California photographers.

We'll be showing the short film, Outta My Light, that my sister Meg Partridge made withour dear friend Dyanna Taylor. (Her dad, Ross Taylor, was our dad's best friend, so the film is highly personal.) After the film, my dad jumps up and answers questions and I basically provide continuity and fill in the gaps. Guaranteed to be fun for all.

Dorothea Lange at the SF Library

There's a beautiful exhibition of Dorothea Lange's photographs at the San Francisco Public Library in the Skylight Gallery up on the sixth floor. It's photos of her cabin at Steep Ravine perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Terrific.

On Tuesday, Feb 19th, my sister Meg will be showing her film, Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life, at 6 pm in the Koret Auditorium. My dad and I will be there with her to take Q and A after the film. My dad, Rondal Partridge, was her assistant when he was young. We all were folded into the family and used to spend sunny days and windy nights out at the cabin with the Taylor-Lange-Dixons.