THE SOLACE OF NATURE - Pelican Publishing Company of Nature_intro.pdfThoreau’s “sanctum...

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The “solace of nature” is a calming gathering of words. In times of grief, many return to nature to find peace in a world unspoiled by human development and destruction, as though they are seeking an imagined Eden where all is pure and in harmony. A warm gulf breeze, a glorious sunset, or a mountain brook in a forest of golden aspens can be as soothing and hypnotic as a violin melody. For centuries, poets have expressed in sonnets the healing elixir of nature. Artists turn to paints and canvas, while others simply find it in Henry David Thoreau’s “sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum,” walking along a mountain path, paddling through dark swampy bayous, or simply taking an early evening stroll along an ocean beach on an outgoing tide. Ansel Adams believed the wilderness possessed healing spiritualities: “As the fisherman depends upon the rivers, lakes and seas, and the farmer upon the land for his existence, so does mankind in general depend upon the beauty of the world for spiritual and emotional existence.” During the nineteenth century, artists were enchanted by radiant sunsets and by the warm, ethereal haze of foggy morning light in a misty Louisiana swamp, by the drama of the Rocky Mountains or the tranquility of an Appalachian waterfall. Artists such as J.M.W. Turner and John Constable in England and the Barbizon and later Impressionist painters in France turned to nature as an escape from the rapid industrialization of their cities. “Salvation,” said the Impressionist master Camille Pissarro, “lies in nature.” The Internet has given us endless discourses on grief, what it is, and how to deal with it. MedicineNet.com, for example, describes grief as a normal reaction and a “dynamic struggle between the pain of the death of the loved one and recovery.” How one reacts internally to that struggle, how one grieves, is as personal as the loss. Therapists have various ways to help the grieving, but the cycle of grief is a journey one must make. C.S. Lewis dealt with the death of his wife in his book A Grief Observed. American writer Joan Didion explored her sorrow over the death of her husband and daughter in her 2005 book The Year of

Magical Thinking. Author Hope Edelman, in Motherless Daughters, tells us of the endless cycle of grief a daughter experiences after the death of her mother. Louisiana nature photographer Julia Sims has taken that journey. She has found the art of seeing nature not through words or paint but through the lens of a camera. Borrowing from novelist James Agee, her images are “as silent as a held breath.” To Julia, photography and nature have become Pissarro’s “salvation” and Thoreau’s “sanctum sanctorum.” The beauty and artistic expression have helped her cope with her mother’s death from cancer in 1967; the brutal murder of her father, Henry Alva Brumfield, in 1973; and the sudden death of her younger brother, Billy, in 1989. “The silence and solitude out there have been healing.” Her thoughts drift inward as she returns to these memories. “It’s a peace I feel out there, a peace I can’t explain. I think that’s why it never gets old. Even when I don’t take a picture, it’s been healing. It gives you a lot of time to think. I don’t know what it is; I just love it. I get lost, but I mean that emotionally. I feel absolutely right and I especially love early mornings when there is a light fog. It is so still and silent. Every sound is individual and so clear. They are comforting. It’s like being above the tree line in another world. It’s healing. I’ve shed many tears out there. Thousands of people have said to me they can feel the emotions in my photographs, especially [those of] the birds. I have always been touched by their comments. Perhaps they sense my peace when I’m photographing nature.” These conversations in silence between place and photographer are spiritual and constant journeys. For her sixtieth birthday in 2002, she traveled with her daughter, Scotty, to Ireland and, later that year, with her son, William, to Costa Rica, not to expand her portfolio of images, but simply to spend time with her children in beautiful and peaceful natural landscapes. “I didn’t take photographs. I just wanted to enjoy and share nature with them.” In a way, Julia’s journey into nature photography reminds one of Andrew Wyeth’s thoughts on his relationship to his paintings: “I am an instrument, trying to

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tune in on the thing that’s already done there. I wish I could be nothing, just float over the woods and fields . . .” Julia’s imagination and inner sorrow, not the camera, are the painter’s brushes that capture the images of dark cypress swamps and coastal marshes or dramatic mountain ranges and flowering alpine meadows. Photography was an excuse to sit for hours and days in nature. It was a distraction. “I can get so focused on photographing a nesting hawk, eagle, or heron that it completely blocks out the pain. Photography allowed me to see and understand that there was good and beauty in life. After my father was murdered, I was so angry towards everyone, even God. Sitting out in nature, photographing God’s world, through time, helped ease the anger. It’s not that nature reduces the grief; it comforts the soul.” Julia’s love of nature and outdoor photography has taken her all over North America and parts of Europe and Africa. The glories and beauties of nature are everywhere in her work. They are in an abandoned lighthouse silhouetted against an intense sunset. They are in the delicate purple iris struggling for survival on the tangled swamp floor and in the chevron-winged egret preening her long, wispy white plumes with the grace of a ballerina’s pirouette. Even in a spring thunderstorm, the swamp is iridescent against the heavy flannel-gray sky, towering black thunderheads, and veils of rain that sweep across the watery prairie. She captures the beauty of a burning sunset in the warm, ethereal light cutting through a misty coastal marsh. Her images reveal the natural rhythms of life as pelicans glide just above the water’s surface

at sunset and as a shrimp boat, with nets opened like gossamer wings against a blood-red sky, makes its way across a south Louisiana lake. She reminds us of the beauty in a flowering mountain meadow, a silky mountain waterfall, or a rainbow arched across a mountain lake. She captures the elegance of the white

spider lily’s delicate petals and the drama of a full moon rising in an indigo sky above the dark silhouette of a cypress swamp. In Africa, the beauty of the Aberdare Mountains, the Samburu Plains, and the Masai Mara in Kenya enchanted her. “There was a feeling I got when in Africa that totally caught me by surprise. There was something about it that touched my heart, spirit, and soul. I didn’t expect that. It is difficult to explain. I do know that after being touched by that something I will never be the same. I loved getting close to animals doing what they do naturally. I watched a mother lion and her cubs. I also followed wild African hunting dogs on their chase.” At one point in the visit,

the guide planned to take Julia’s group to a spa on Lake Victoria, but she refused, preferring instead to see the Masai Mara on the northern edge of the great Serengeti National Park. Her guide flew her in and dropped her off while the rest of her group moved on to a bit of pampering on Lake Victoria. “I saw thousands of migrating wildebeest,” she says, recounting her brief visit to the Serengeti. “It was magnificent.” Whether in the planes of Africa; the snow-crested mountains of Alaska, Montana, or British Columbia and Alberta, Canada; the rocky coasts of

The cape buffalo is considered by many to be the most dangerous African mammal. Although strictly herbivorous, it is unpredictable and aggressive. Aberdare Mountains, Kenya


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Washington and California; the forests of Europe; the swamps of south Louisiana; the rainforest of Costa Rica; or the spirit-haunted mountains of New Mexico and Arizona, Julia searches for that moment when nature completely envelops her spirit. “When I go deep into a swamp, a forest, or into the mountains, the door shuts. It’s another world. Everything is blocked out. I love to get to that place when literally a door shuts behind me in that world. You have to get way out when it’s only you, God, and nature.” Julia, who now divides her time between southern Louisiana and northern Montana, did not start out as a professional photographer or set out to photo-document wilderness areas. She and her husband, Joe Arthur, simply enjoyed being completely immersed in the purity of the landscape and its natural sounds. Photography came later. Her interest in the outdoors began while Joe Arthur was in the army and stationed in Germany. “We took up hiking in the mountains and that opened up a whole new world to me. When we got back to Louisiana, we couldn’t do that. So we took up canoeing. I enjoyed that but it didn’t give us the same feeling as being up in the mountains.” Then a friend took them deep into the Manchac Swamp, located near their home in Ponchatoula, Louisiana. “I had lived in Louisiana all my life and I had never been that far back in a swamp.” The next day the Simses bought an airboat. For over twenty years, Julia photographed the wildlife, the trappers, and the people who relied upon the swamp for their livelihoods, as well as Manchac’s almost

surreal landscape. That adventure is chronicled in her book Manchac Swamp: Louisiana’s Undiscovered Wilderness. Being a simple spectator to that beauty was not enough. Through photography she could become a participant in the natural drama. After taking

a beginner’s “this is your camera” course at Newcomb College in New Orleans, she signed up for wildlife photography workshops around the country taught by some of the best shooters in the business. Her work gradually improved, so much so that by the mid-1980s she had a contract with the Peter Arnold Agency in New York, one of the most prestigious stock photo houses in the nation. In addition, her work has appeared in National Geographic as well as in an impressive list of other books and national publications.

Julia’s fascination with Louis-iana’s wetlands began as a child growing up in Baton Rouge. During frequent family automobile trips

from Baton Rouge to New Orleans along Airline Highway, she loved to let her imagination wander into the seemingly impenetrable dark swamps that stretched to the highway’s edge. These were the days before interstate highways and air-conditioned cars. A cooling breeze meant opening the window. “I remember hanging out the car window and seeing the southern edge of the beautiful Manchac Swamp. I can remember thinking, ‘What’s back there?’ There was just that wall. To think, now I’m back there. Maybe even then there was something there that drew me. One of my favorite stories as a child was The Secret Garden. It’s a story of a little girl who finds this magical garden. I’d look at the swamp and

Cypress trees in their fall colors, Lake Maurepas


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think there must be a magical garden back there.” Fittingly, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1912 novel, The Secret Garden, is about a lonely English girl who found not only solace on a Yorkshire moor, but also the wonders of life that awakened her imagination. The garden, as the child in the novel says, “was the sweetest, most mysterious-looking place any one could find.” Julia Sims has been on a continuous journey to those “most mysterious-looking” places just beyond the swamp’s edge or the next mountain range to her own secret gardens. Julia had an ordinary childhood growing up in Baton Rouge. Born February 17, 1942, she attended Baton Rouge High and, like many teenagers in the late 1950s, had few special interests other than weekend dates. After graduation in 1960, she settled in at Louisiana State University where she had planned to become a veterinarian, but “people said girls didn’t do that.” Instead, like many young women of the time, she went on to get a degree in education. After graduation in 1964, she struck out on her own, moved to the New Orleans French Quarter, and got a teaching job first at a fashionable uptown Episcopal school and then later in a public school across the river from the city.

In July 1967, Julia married Joe Arthur Sims of Hammond, whom she had met on a blind date in her freshman year at LSU. Then tragedy struck. Julia’s mother, Sylvia, better known as Scotty, diagnosed with cancer in 1960, learned that she had little time left, the disease had spread. Julia quit her teaching job so that she and Joe Arthur could move back to Baton Rouge to be with her mother. “We moved in with her and took care of her,” Julia says, recalling

those difficult months. “She died in her bed.” Julia describes her mother not in sentimental terms but as a strong and accomplished woman. Born Sylvia Scott in Oakdale, Louisiana, she was the daughter of a physician who died in an

automobile accident when Sylvia was seventeen years old. Two months later her sister also was killed. Young Scotty went on to receive a degree in journalism from Louisiana State University and later wrote speeches for her husband, Henry Alva Brumfield—friends called him Al—when he successfully ran for the state senate in the early 1950s. Scotty and Al divorced in the 1960s. “After she got cancer,” Julia says, “my mother decided to leave my father. She was a strong woman.” Years later, Julia recalls how much her mother loved to take walks in the fog. “She would say a walk in the fog is good for your soul. She loved poetry and wrote poetry. She had a book of her favorite poems. I have it now. One poem she loved was by Carl Sandburg—‘The fog comes on little [cat] feet. It sits looking over the harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.’ I have watched hundreds of mornings where the sun slowly burns off morning fog. It’s like a different painting every minute. I do agree with my mother; it is truly good for one’s soul.” A year after her mother died, Joe Arthur was called up for military service. The year was 1968 and the nation was tearing itself apart over the Vietnam War. Joe Arthur, slated for the Quartermaster Corps, secured a posting in Heidelberg, West Germany, with the Judge Advocate General Corps. The Simses were

there from late 1969 to 1973. During that time, their daughter, Scotty, was born. Like most American troops stationed in Germany, the couple traveled

Great egret, preening, with her young. Great egrets are steadfast guards of their nest. Manchac Swamp


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throughout Europe with their infant daughter. But what Julia remembers and enjoyed most was hiking along trails in Germany’s forests. “During those three years, it became almost an addiction with me. My personality changed when I got deep into the forest. We would go for six- and seven-hour hikes. That’s all I really wanted to do. When I got back from Germany is when I realized what I had experienced—a peace around me. It was something that just came over me. When I look back, it was almost a spiritual kind of feeling. It wasn’t really the hiking; it was just being there.” They returned to Louisiana in 1973 when Joe Arthur’s father died suddenly of a heart attack. Five days later Julia’s own father was murdered in his Baton Rouge home. Henry Alva Brumfield had been a successful Baton Rouge tort attorney who had served several terms as a state senator. He eventually dropped out of political life after an unsuccessful run for Congress. Al Brumfield was born in Centerville, Mississippi. The son of a storekeeper, Al contracted polio when he was two years old, leaving him with a decided limp for the rest of his life. He worked his way through Louisiana State University as a janitor while putting his three sisters through school. In later years, with his career and reputation in full glory, Brumfield lectured on tort law to bar association meetings throughout the nation. “He was such a charismatic attorney,” Julia says, her thoughts recalling horrific events about to come. “He could convince a jury of anything. That’s why I could never understand why he couldn’t talk these people out of killing him.”

On May 25, 1973, three criminals looking for easy money ended Al Brumfield’s life. In a story chillingly similar to Truman Capote’s gripping 1965

novel In Cold Blood, a rumor had gotten around Baton Rouge that Brumfield kept a safe in his house filled with money. No one knows for sure how the story got started, but Julia has her suspicions. Just as in Capote’s story, there was

no safe filled with money. The three men had cased the house a week before to see how difficult the job would be. It was a new house facing the golf course on Fairway Drive, which at the time was still sparsely populated. Brumfield had recently installed a burglary alarm system on his windows, except for one window that overlooked the golf course and a birdbath.

Brumfield had planned to be at his weekend house in Gulf Shores, Alabama, that day but cancelled his trip to attend the funeral of Joe Arthur’s father. Julia and Joe Arthur were supposed to spend the night with her father after the funeral, but at the last minute, they decided to delay the visit another day. The next morning, she called her father’s home, but got no answer. After several attempts, she telephoned her older brother, Beau, in Baton Rouge and asked him to check on their father. Beau drove to the house and found his father dead on the floor.

According to court records, the conspirators hatched two plans to rob Brumfield. The first scenario provided that if Brumfield were not home, three of them would break into the house and search for the safe. If Brumfield were there, the three would knock on the front door. When Brumfield answered, one would pretend to be a plainclothes

policeman. After putting Brumfield at ease, the three planned to rush into the house and rob him at gunpoint. The one disguised as a police officer wore a coat and tie and a wig and carried a badge. Meanwhile, two others involved

Young great egret coaxing mother. Manchac Swamp


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in the scheme sat in a nearby car with walkie-talkies to keep a lookout for Brumfield or anyone else who might return to the house. According to a court transcript, on May 25, 1973, two men entered the house while a third, armed with a shotgun, hid on the roof of the house to watch for Brumfield. Tragically, Brumfield came home. After parking in the carport, he entered the backyard through an iron gate. Just then, the armed man on the roof dropped down behind him and forced him into the house. One of the intruders pistol-whipped Brumfield, hoping he would give the location of the wall safe. Brumfield said he did not have a safe in his house but did have one at his office. The intruders tied his arms and legs behind his back with torn strips of a sheet ripped from his bed. Finding no safe or large stash of cash, one of the three men shot Brumfield in the back of his head. They had nothing to lose. He had seen their faces and could testify against them in court. The only thing taken from the house was Brumfield’s gold money clip and $420 in cash. The killers later divided the money up. In Louisiana at the time, a person convicted of armed robbery could go to prison for life without possibility of pardon or parole. Convicted murderers, on the other hand, could be pardoned or paroled at some point. “The thugs know the law better than some lawyers,” Julia says angrily. “They had everything to gain by killing my father.” Fortunately, one intruder left a bit of evidence under Brumfield’s body—a

trinket that had only recently been given to Baton Rouge schoolchildren. Baton Rouge police detectives checked all the schools and eventually came up with an address in a local trailer park. A few days later, they raided the trailer home where

they found the entire gang, including the lookouts. Only one was missing, Tom Jones, allegedly the lookout on the carport roof. He had fled to Texas the night before the raid. All had criminal records. Eventually, all went to trial, were convicted, and sent to prison.

By 1978, Julia felt that she had to talk to one of the alleged intruders. “I wasn’t getting any better. I was getting worse. I wanted him to tell me he was sorry, that he had done a terrible thing. I wanted to know why.” Against the advice of her brother Billy and Joe Arthur, she arranged for a meeting with Eugene Redwine at Angola. “There was a screen between us and a guard outside. I remember

when I walked into this room and he walked in the other side. I have this locket that was my mother’s and I could see it rising and falling on my chest. My heart was pounding. I kept asking myself, What am I doing? He sat down and I sat down. I didn’t want to cry in front of him. I didn’t want to scream and tell him how much I hated him. I just prayed that I could control these two emotions. All of a sudden I got this feeling of peace within me. It was amazing. I was calm and I asked him if he killed my father. He said in a cold, ugly way, ‘I didn’t kill your daddy.’ This was a catharsis for me and I began

Still waters of Manchac Swamp create a mirror world reflecting cypresses and a young snowy egret feeding in the early-morning light.


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the process of healing.” In 1993, Redwine came up for parole, but it was denied. He died in prison. In 1990, Julia received a telephone call from the popular television show America’s Most Wanted. The producers wanted to help find Jones. “By that time, I was almost paralyzed because my brother Billy had just died six months earlier,” Julia says. “It mattered [the television show] but it didn’t quite matter at that moment.” The show did not turn up any leads, but later that year she learned from a probation officer that Jones was alive and living somewhere in Texas. Julia went to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s office in Baton Rouge to report what she had learned, but the FBI agents did not give her much hope and she went home discouraged. Three days later she received a call from Agent Roger White, who had just been assigned the case. He asked her if she had any information. “I told him I had boxes of information. He said, ‘You have my word. If he’s alive, I’ll catch him.’” She was hopeful but not optimistic. After years of following dead-end leads and detective work, including computer-generated images of what an aging Tom Jones might look like, Julia got a telephone call on January 14, 1997, just as she was about to leave for a photography seminar in Corpus Christi, Texas. It was Roger White with the news that Jones had been arrested. He had been living in Texas with a new name and wife. He eventually pled guilty to armed robbery

and was sentenced to ninety-nine years at hard labor without benefit of parole. Jones later appealed the long sentence but lost. He, too, died in prison. While grieving over her father’s murder, the sorrow, pain, and subsequent

trials, another tragedy entered her life, a tragedy that still weighs heavily upon her thoughts. It was the death in 1989 of her younger brother, William “Billy” Pigott Brumfield, a man she describes as one who loved life and “found joy in everything he did.” Billy was an avid reader, art collector, and graduate of Tulane University’s law school. His life had been one of tragedy and strength. In 1959 at the age of fourteen, he broke his neck during a church picnic in St. Francisville, Louisiana. He was paralyzed from the neck down, but after seven major surgeries, including one in which tendons were taken from his toes to help him use his hands, Billy fought

and worked his way back. “Ultimately, everything came back except complete use of his hands. Billy lived for the moment. Many of his friends said he enjoyed life more in one moment than many do in a lifetime.”

In July 1989, Julia had planned a trip to the coastal hamlet of Cocodrie, Louisiana, to photograph Gulf Coast barrier islands for a client. The day before she was to leave, she and Joe Arthur had visited Billy in Baton Rouge. Julia forgot her purse at Billy’s house, so she called him to arrange to pick it up. Billy was scheduled to drive to Lake Charles the next day on business, and they agreed

Morning cypress, Manchac Swamp


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to meet halfway between New Orleans and Lake Charles, at the courthouse in Houma. She invited him to go on with her to Cocodrie and to the islands. Not being much for the outdoors, he declined. The next day, Billy failed to show up in Houma or in Lake Charles. Worried, his office began calling around to his friends, but nobody had seen him. Finally, they called the police, who went to his home. They found him hanging by the neck. “Joe Arthur called me,” Julia says, her eyes moistening. “I was on a barge and I wanted to stay another two days. I was getting some good shots. He said, ‘You really need to come back. You know, we’re trying to rent my father’s office building.’ It wasn’t like Joe Arthur to insist that I return. I said, ‘I’m getting some great shots.’ He said I had to come back. So I did. It took about an hour and a half boat ride to get back to the landing. When I got off the boat I ran to a pay phone and called home. I thought something had happened to one of my kids. My daughter, Scotty, answered the phone. She asked if I had talked with Daddy yet. I said, ‘No. Are you okay? Is William okay?’ I saw Joe Arthur driving into the parking lot at the Cocodrie marina. Scotty said, ‘Just remember how much I love you.’ I ran up to Joe Arthur and he said, ‘Billy’s dead.’ I screamed. On the way back, he said the police think it was a suicide. I said, ‘No way!’” When Julia and Joe Arthur arrived at Billy’s house, the police were already there. One of the detectives had just returned from a seminar on autoerotic asphyxiation. “He said this was a classic case,” she says, now composed. Clinically, autoerotic asphyxiation, or AeA, is defined under sexual

masochism as “hypoxyphilia.” Police often classify deaths from hypoxyphilia as suicides or, in some cases, homicides. It claims thousands of lives annually.

Experts say the phenomenon is most common among young men and it often starts innocently at a very young age. A young man will tighten his necktie too tightly, cutting off blood and oxygen to the brain. When the knot is loosened, the person gets a rush as the blood flows quickly to the brain. Some people are repulsed by the choking sensation, while others enjoy the erotic rush. It can start that simply. The brother of an AeA victim once described the grizzly but euphoric method: “Neck constriction is accompanied by placing some form of ligature around the neck that is designed to give the victim control of the pressure and provide an escape mechanism. Transient cerebral hypoxia during autoerotic manipulation, combined with physical helplessness and self-endangerment to the degree that life is threatened, enhances sexual gratification—but it also weakens the victim’s self-control and judgment, occasionally resulting in accidental death from the failure of or the victim’s inability to operate previously arranged self-rescue mechanisms.” Billy had such a device with all the safeguards. Yet he died. The policeman who had attended the seminar told Julia that Billy had been kneeling on concrete blocks that must have slipped.

Billy’s death, especially the circumstances, devastated her. She could not understand how

someone so full of life could be so self-destructive. For years she could not talk

Wegan, Switzerland


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about his death, especially how he died. “I felt I had lost my idol,” she says years later as she carefully revisits that painful time. “I had unconditional love for my brother. I loved being with him. I loved talking with him. We were wonderful friends, and I didn’t think about surviving his death. I’ve never had a problem with depression, but soon after Billy died, I went into a deep, deep depression. I didn’t care if I lived or died. What also made it difficult was that I didn’t want to tell anybody how he died. What Billy was doing was so very personal. I still feel that way. I didn’t want people to think that he was some kind of creep, lurking in dark alleys.” Julia spent the next decade grieving for her brother and searching for answers to why this happened. For years she had worked with Sister June Englebrecht and a hospice group in Hammond, Louisiana, to help cope with her mother’s and, later, father’s deaths. In 1981 she received a master’s degree in social work, knowing that she wanted to work in a hospice group with other grieving families. She even took a course on sociopaths in search of reasons why her father was murdered. She suggested to Sister June that they start a hospice group for families that had lost someone to sudden death. “It’s different when someone has a terminal illness,” she says. “You start grieving then. The pain is not less; it’s just different in the case of a sudden death. There are no rules. The shock is greater, the denial is greater, everything is greater. When my mother died, the grief was natural. I’d been

grieving for a long time before she died. My father died suddenly and that was different.” She and Sister June continued the new bereavement group for

about a year, but Julia quit when Billy died. When Sister June asked Julia to return, she agreed but only if she could return as a member of the group, not as group leader. “It took me a long time to say how Billy died in front of a group. Even then people looked at me oddly. I eventually came to understand that you have to concentrate not on how they died but how they lived.” In 1997 she attended a seminar on the subject in Scottsdale, Arizona, where she met a police detective who had lost a brother to AeA. Subsequent conversations with the detective also helped her talk openly about Billy.

In true Julia fashion, Billy’s death and autoerotic asphyxiation

became a cause in her life. She believes something must be done to help police departments recognize the syndrome when they come upon it. She was well on her way in exploring federal grants to fund workshops when a Baton Rouge serial killer demanded the police department’s full attention. “One day,” she says, “I will do something about this. It’s so common. My dream is to have police officers and school counselors know what to look for. These deaths are such tragedies for families, and parents don’t understand.” If working with the sick and dying were not enough, she also has played an active role in the state’s criminal justice system. In 1996 she heard then-governor Murphy J. “Mike” Foster, Jr., in a radio interview say he wanted victims’ families

Rainbow after summer shower, Lake Temagami, Ontario


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on the state’s pardon board. Julia submitted her name and, to her surprise, Foster appointed her. “I’m fair,” she says. “I’m good at it and I don’t prejudge the people. It’s emotionally draining. One of the things I did was to make sure victims’ families are notified when inmates come up for a hearing. I encourage the families to be there. It’s a catharsis for them. They don’t get to talk at the trial. We’re giving them a fair playing field. We see the inmates and their families as well as their victims and their families. I judge them fairly and keep them in if they need to be kept in.” In 2004, Gov. Kathleen Blanco reappointed Julia to another four-year term. She left the board in 2008. When conversation moves from personal tragedies to the swamps, coastal mashes, and mountain meadows, her thoughts drift inward to a private and beautiful world that she permits others to enter only through her photographs. The famed French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson once expressed that personal relationship between photography and the photographer’s inner thoughts: “With one eye that is closed, one looks within, with the other eye that is open, one looks without.” The purpose, he said, is to seek “the decisive moment” and capture “a relationship between the eye and the heart.” To Julia, that relationship is truly spiritual. “It’s not the photography I love,” she explains. “It’s nature that I love. I enjoy photography

and it’s a challenge to capture a moment. When I get that right moment, I say Mother Nature did it, but I was there to capture the opportunity. Sometimes,

though, I come back and my husband asks me if I got any good pictures and I say no. He asks why I’m so happy. I say, ‘Because I was there.’ Something just comes over me. It’s an inner peace that I get out there. I know it played a tremendous part in my healing after my brother’s death. You don’t have to go into the swamp or marsh to get this feeling. You can get it anywhere. The essence of God is out there. It’s part of nature. I’m not just surrounding myself in nature, but I’m allowing myself to feel the power and comfort of nature. It allowed me to see and understand there was good and beauty and life should be enjoyed. If I had not had the healing and comforting hand of

nature through these tragedies, I would not have had the courage to move forward in doing the positive things in my life, such as helping to start and working with the hospice program, co-chairing the sudden death bereavement group, ten years as the victim rights nominee on the state pardon board, and, one day, having seminars on autoerotic asphyxiation.” Her search for that moment, that solace, that healing, has given us a magnificent body of work that helps us all in our own journeys.

Early autumn frost frames alpine meadow, Lake O’Hara region, Yaho National Park, British Columbia


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