At first impression, the legendary photographer Mary Randlett doesn’t seem 80 years old.
She’s still got a vibrant smile displaying love for life, and a zest in her demeanor that comes across in youthfully idyllic dialogue. And when she pulls her pictures out for show, her eyes light up as she flutters describing their composition.
She makes it sound like it was only yesterday, but the dates on the black and white photographs read “May 1967,” “June 1986,” “May 2005,” and on in an array.
She clutched her first camera (a Kodak) as a curious 10-year-old back in the 1940s. Now a lifetime later she’s a nationally feted Northwest treasure who’s captured some of the most interesting and illustrious people and places that this corner of the world had to offer in the latter half of the 20th Century.
She and her old-school, still dark-room-developed photos are featured this month at the Bainbridge Arts and Crafts Gallery. Her landscape portraits and studies of nature will share The Gallery’s showroom with an exhibit of 21st century metal curated by Mary Lee Hu, who gives a gallery talk 2 p.m. April 12.
Randlett’s talk will be at 2 p.m. Sunday.
SPEAKING OF PHOTOGRAPHY
“A million things go through my head when I take a photograph, all in an instant,” Randlett described. “I always think ‘Make it look like … ’ Make it look like some painting I’d seen, or make it look like this, or like that.”
She’s been documenting history and capturing this country’s beauty in that fashion for the past four decades. She’s probably best known for her portraiture work with famous figures of the 1960s-era artistic and literary community. But her natural and architectural photos were also featured in the first book published by the National Register of Historic Places, and some of each genre now sit in permanent collections across the country including the Smithsonian Institution and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Her photos first received national attention in 1949 when she shot the Slo-Mo-Shun IV hydroplane’s first trial run on Lake Washington when it became the fastest boat in the world.
Randlett had recently graduated with a political science degree from Whitman College in 1947 without any particular vocation in mind. Needing a job, she started selling sporting goods at a retail store. Soon after she noticed that the men she worked with were getting paid more while selling less than she did. She asked for a raise, and she was fired.
But she didn’t need that job at the Bon Marche.
“That’s when I said, ‘I’m going to be a photographer,’ ” Randlett said, leaning in with a smile.
She’d taken photography courses in high school, but dropped out when teachers tried to tell her how to take photos. She wasn’t into that.
After approaching and apprenticing with New York fashion photographer Hans Jorgensen, “the beginning of everything” for Randlett in photography was when he introduced her to the twin-lens Rollieflex camera.
Though the model has changed through the years, she’s been living with a camera in hand ever since. “I never really earned enough money to support myself,” she said, answering “barely” to the question of how’d she get by. “But I wouldn’t trade my life for anything.”
THE EYES TO SEE PHOTOGRAPHY
In 1963, Randlett was the last person to ever photograph the famous poet Theodore Roethke before he died.
At that time, based in “small-town” Seattle, she’d already developed a reputation among the artistic, literary and architectural communities of the Northwest as a beloved and very natural portrait photographer.
She’d photographed Morris Graves at his house on Lake Washington in 1949. Soon after she’d photograph Mark Tobey. Over the years, she’s collected an album, somewhat of a who’s who list, of luminaries ranging from William Cumming to Imogen Cunnigham, Jacob Lawrence to Tom Robbins.
She’s actually more a fan of photography in nature — “it’s a real intrusion with people,” she said — but among all the enigmatic and illustrious people Randlett has ever known or gleaned inspiration from, she’s learned something from each one.
The Canadian painter and author Emily Carr, an artist of great influence for Randlett, gave her “the eyes to see clear cuts.” Another Canadian naturalist Roderick Haig-Brown gave her “the eyes to see water,” painter Kenneth Callahan gave her the eyes for mountains, and artist Leo Kenney, the eyes for the tension between dark and light. The list goes on.
Randlett has learned a lot in a life spent with intellectuals.
“People who think they can go at it alone are crazy,” she said. WU
An exhibit of Mary Randlett’s landscape photography will be featured along with 21st Century Jewelry curated by Mary Lee Hu and the brightly abstract paintings of Mark Horiuchi throughout April at Bainbridge Arts and Crafts, 151 Winslow Way E, Bainbridge. A reception for the artists is slated for the First Friday Art Walk, 5-8 p.m. April 4. Handlett will give a gallery talk at 2 p.m. April 5.
Info: www.bainbridgeartsandcrafts.org or call the gallery at (206) 842-3132.
