One of the best photographs on display was taken during a family holiday in their cottage near the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland in 1982. Paul looks playfully relaxed in slippers and dressing gown, balancing on a rickety fence, while his son James leaps from the bonnet of a Land Rover and his daughter Stella sits in the foreground, absorbed in some private game.
It's a formally complex picture: Stella's hunched body visually echoes the sack and the standing stones on the left; James, generating maximum lift-off with his outstretched right leg, mirrors the dog in the background, its body also taut with energy; Paul balances the dark mass of the vehicle and the cottage. James's fearless jump recalls a well-known photograph from 1960 of the French artist Yves Klein leaping off the top of a wall.
Despite its rigour and compositional harmony, the picture wasn't staged. Like Cartier-Bresson, Linda was always searching for the "decisive moment", and here she managed to click the shutter at just the right time, creating an image that not only looks good, but captures her family's characters, too. It is easy to read Paul's balancing act as a metaphor for the difficulty of being a decent dad as well as one of the world's most famous men.
