Events that become history
Stephen Gardiner
A CENTURY OF IMAGES: PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE GIBSON FAMILY by Rex Cowan, introduction by John le Carre Deutsch, £19.99, pp. 135 This story of the fairytale Scilly Isles, treasure islands indeed for all imaginative explorers who first encounter them, and covering something of West Cornwall too, is told in three ways: by the Gibson family's photographs, going as far back as 1869, by Rex Cowan's meticulous historical record, and by John le Carres close-up of the current Gibson photographer, Frank, each absolutely fascinating for anyone who is, like these three, captivated by this mysteri- ous, eerie, romantic outpost of England. Le Carre's introduction is, predictably, a touchingly sensitive study of character; rather as a sculptor might inspect a head before making a likeness, le Cane walks all round his subject with questions about the Gibson forebears, his own life, work, professional methods.
Ask Frank his profession and he might quite likely tell you 'shopkeeper'. And certainly there is a part of Frank that is proud to be a humble island trader, bedded in the commu- nity, selling his pictures and postcards and books of local photographs across the counter and hearing the till ring, as it has rung for the three previous generations of Gibson forebears, on Scilly and in Penzance.
From the knowledge he extracts from Frank Gibson, in bits, jerkily, he weaves a picture with the clarity of the Scillies' light (a light which matters profoundly to Frank, the photographer) and which, moreover, gives another, necessary dimension to the superb photographs, whatever their date: Hugh Town, St Mary's, on May Day (1900), and the town's beach (1870); the Chilean steel barque Queen Mab towed into its harbour — with, of course, not a car to be seen anywhere. It is the thought of what has happened since — since, as my father said (who went to the islands every July to draw), income tax was introduced — that makes Frank explode with anger: the suburbanisation of the town's edges, the build-up of traffic, the inevitable, hideous double yellow lines, the pollution of mass-tourism, and all accelerated by the Duchy of Cornwall's huge hotel on St Martin's which, together with its generally insensitive attitude, led to his furious resig- nation from the Scilly Isles Environmental Trust.
The family's passion for photography, started by John Gibson in the 1860s, has never faded. He was recording, he said, `events that will become history', the threat as it was then of the industrial revolution since metamorphosing into the commer- cialisation his great grandson is witnessing now. John's sons, Alexander and Herbert, joined his unique photographic business in the studio on Penzance's Promenade when they left school at 12, turning out as excel- lent assistants. Rex Cowan writes: John or Alexander would compose the photograph, and the third member of the team — often Herbert — would operate the camera. The Gibson style of photographic composition is unmistakable.
They understood drama and scale — as Frank would say, 'a photograph must have a story and 'it must have — and were, as Cowan points out, 'gifted photo-journal- ists and reporters'. After a cable had been laid between Land's End and St Mary's in 1869, they were first with the telegraphic news of the dozens of shipwrecks on the Scilly Isles' shores: the catastrophic disaster of the German passenger steamer Schiller in 1875 was a particular coup.
Two aspects of these astonishing photographs stand out: shipwrecks like Minnehaha (1874) and Mildred (1912) are exceedingly dramatic, but strange too is the picture of the Scillies, Penzance, St Ives, Newlyn and elsewhere untouched, unspoilt, as they were before the modern invaders came.
Retouched view of the horror of the Minnehaha, wrecked in 1874 with a cargo of guano.
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