Reviews for Quizzical Eye: The Photography of Rondal Partridge

The average rating for Quizzical Eye: The Photography of Rondal Partridge based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-06-23 00:00:00 Kristine Marie As an lover of earlier photography and as a groupie to the ghosts of those eccentric, yet exceedingly generous, group of late nineteenth-early twentieth Bostonian connoisseurs, collectors and donors who established Boston as a Temple to the Arts, I find it hard to be objective about this catalog, written by the impeccable Trevor Fairbrother to accompany the eponymous exhibition organized last year by the Addison Gallery of American Art. With an elegant and informative forward by Brian Allen, The Mary Stripp and R. Crosby Kemper Director of the Addison, and by Allison Kemmerer, Curator of Photographer and of Art After 1950, this slim but beautifully designed catalog, with its pristine reproductions of the highly artistic photographs by F. Holland Day, is all that a devotee, or scholar, might wish to hold in her hands. New information for me included the practice of Grangerism, a pastime in which serious readers of poets and other writers might deconstruct a volume and reassemble it with their own intimate sketches, drawings, homages and margin notes; and I learned about the relationship between Stieglitz and Day, at first collegial and supportive, and then, as was seemingly inevitable with Stieglitz, one of fierce competition and jealously. Oh, Alfred. From a historic preservation perspective, I am also interested, and impressed, that other, larger Boston institutions are collaborating with the Norwood Historical Society, once the family home of F. Holland Day, to do their best to preserve this historically significant building. The catalog, faces head-on, and must be given credit for, the murkier issues of Day's fascination the exotic, with homoeroticism and with his gorgeous, but scandalizing depictions of himself as the Christ figure. "The Seven Words" with Day's tortured facial expressions and his crown of thorns simulating those of Jesus on the Cross, and his "Cruxificion", also designed and taken in 1898, were scandalous, but in fact, were following similarly inspired musical settings by Beethoven and Hayden, and emulating friezes by John Singer Sargent on this very subject. Can you tell that, every count, I was smitten?

Review # 2 was written on 2010-07-19 00:00:00 Jacques Hobscheid In some ways this is a good biology text for non-majors. The language is simple enough for a non-scientist, yet it is comprehensive and goes into sufficient detail to give a good understanding. There are a few mistakes (e.g., he defines a mole as a measure of weight, but in fact a mole is a measure of the number of atoms or particles). He also uses a bad analogy in describing the two strands of DNA as being "mirror images of each other". This is misleading. I hope the 8th edition will correct these items.