I recently told you about the joy, nostalgia or sadness in front of a few emails received.
There are also sometimes amazing and unexpected things like these images of Paula Rae Gibson with this text by the great-great-great-grand-daughter of Julia Margaret Cameron.
Jean-Jacques Naudet
This is Josa. She is the great great great grand daughter of the great great great Julia Margaret Cameron.
I love there’s an award now in JMC’s name and that i’m a winner for the’ women on women ‘ category this year and that by chance two years ago I met Josa, I felt a connection with her free lively spirit and sensual way of looking at life.We spent an afternoon together .These images came from that. I realized how little I knew about JMC , only sensing she, as I, lived for beauty and depth and being true to herself.
I learnt how much loss, grieving ,as for all of us? made her need to create, as if to fill the hole and was saddened that she was thought less of by her family, as is so often the case for anyone free spirited, full of passion and talent that seems to come out of nowhere and almost morally pin the rest of the family to the wall.
Paula Rae Gibson
In Josa’s words….
Julia Margaret’s only daughter Julia died in childbirth – a portrait of the child that killed her,, hangs on my sitting room wall.
Her husband Charles Norman, who greatly resembles my handsome brother Charles, was desolated by her loss. It was clearly a love match. Pictures taken of Julia and Charles, by JMC, winding herself around her husband like a little sensual cat, were most unusual for the mid 19th-century. But then JMC never did what anyone expected of her. She was lucky enough to have a loving tolerant husband.
My great grandfather Archie, JMC’s grandson, married a snobbish woman called Mildred Wake. Anything even slightly out of the most proper, philistine, upper class propriety was stamped on hard, and I think this is why following generations were almost ashamed of JMC and she was treated as an object of fun. This made me feel very cross as I found out more about her. I felt intense admiration for her – not just for her photography, but for her great kindness and generosity towards orphaned Anglo-Indian children and other waifs and strays. She adored beauty, and that trait was passed down.
JMC was business minded as well as everything else. She didn’t allow social propriety or her gender to get in the way of her life as a working artist. What she did was no genteel hobby but a source of revenue as well as satisfaction. She was also scientific, corresponding even as a very young woman with Sir John Herschel, who invented and named photography. She travelled without any sense of boundaries, in a way that I long to now. If I can just produce one creative thing that people really like, I will feel I have lived up to her, but my medium is words.
I love her energy. The fact that she was middle aged and had to get child stuff out of the way to get going. I think that is very common for creative women. Having and bringing up children is, or should be, a supreme act of creation. It needs to lessen as an overwhelming passion to allow other creativity to emerge.
www.paularaegibson.com
