Reportage Illustration: Visual Journalism

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Although I didn’t read children’s picture books at all, I experienced different people and their stories every day in the market. This experience led me to be interested in humans and society. Today, all my current personal projects are a reflection of my past environment to some extent. For example, I’ve produced work in the Birmingham Bullring Open Market and at the Frankfurt Christmas Market. For me these are both familiar and strange settings. In this way they inspire me to see the same things differently and to try to express that in my work.” It’s those moments where the drawing could be rubbish – and sometimes it is – and sometimes the process of drawing it becomes much more important than the end result.” when I'm drawing in arms fairs I'm continually baffled by how to get beneath the surface, so sometimes I draw really wildly and sometimes I decide it's the polite veneer I need to draw, and the drawings are much more restrained. I'm continually baffled, continually dissatisfied, continually on the point of wanting to destroy entire sketchbooks in frustration, and yet it's that challenge that keeps me at it. Every now and again once in a blue moon there is a drawing which does get beneath the surface, but I would say most often you do need a bit of text to give context as well. Capote uses sophisticated language, imagery and a deep dive into the complex emotions and relationships surrounding the case, presenting it through the eyes of the murders, victims and community members. Private view Friday 3rd October 6.30pm at Topolski Studio Open to the public with drop-in family art activities: Saturday 4th and Sunday 5th October 10am-6pm Monday 6th 10am-5pm and Tuesday 7th October 10am-3pm

People like to tell their story and at the very least it’s a distraction from a difficult life in a refugee camp or a break from the monotony of work. But people think it’s odd, and they ask lots of questions. I sometimes get accused of being a spy… I think so. Photography is brilliant, but we’ve just become obsessed and addicted to it and forgotten some nice bits of creativity on the way. The very real paranoia of being freelance is that if you say no, you don’t get the next job. In many cases that is true. I often charge less for the jobs I want to do, the jobs that are good for my career, and the ones that get me the next job. You don’t have to charge less if you don’t want to. The more likely scenario is your friend’s start up business, or your dad’s mate writes a children’s book. These should be charged properly, because they are a huge risk and low reward. I never work on the promise of publicity either, it never happens. Reportage drawing finds its roots in the wish for information. According to Gary Embury and Mario Minichiello in their book, ‘Reportage Illustration: Visual Journalism’ historically it has documented conflicts and wars, courtrooms (where cameras are not allowed to be present in the UK), news reports and investigations and social events, such as protests and concerts.

With a wide selection of visual approaches to reportage, there’s a great range of images to enjoy. From Anna Cattermole’s two-year record of shipbuilding to Anne Howeson’s dreamlike images of the vanishing buildings of London’s Kings Cross. Examining the images is revealing. Scale is an element of the compositions which often places the human aspect of the image into the context of its surroundings. As in Alex Nicholson’s drawing of a demonstration outside the monumental buildings around Bank in London, or the intimate space occupied by Steve Wilkin’s commuters, drawn regularly on his daily travels to work. https://youtu.be/1KsL_W4Dccg Video can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Veronica Lawlor: Caught In The Act (https://youtu.be/1KsL_W4Dccg) https://youtu.be/q_mn1K_dBzI Video can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Tim King, who has documented his entire year though reportage illustration – Londoner #59 (https://youtu.be/q_mn1K_dBzI) In my last year of University someone mentioned reportage illustration. Until then I had no idea what it was. I remember thinking if only you had told me this before. It all made sense. I admired all the old illustrators who had drawn the news over the last 150 years without ever knowing it was called ‘Reportage’.

Materials can be varied for reportage, with the digital proving effective for many. Jenny Soep often using a tablet to capture live music events, and Tim Vyner creating fascinating time lapse films of his drawings. And opportunities keep arising. Vyner gives a mature reflection of how reportage could develop and how technology could impact on the way visual journalism is recorded. L.R – It is done on location as much as possible and I usually turn down jobs that have nothing to do with this way of working. Reportage illustration is a type of visual journalism. Reportage illustrators sketch on location to tell a specific story. The illustrator conveys a narrative and reports a specific moment in time to the audience, much like a journalist. The central premise of reportage illustration is storytelling.As resident artist at iconic music venue, the Half Moon Putney, I use reportage journalism to tell a specific story documenting the creative energy of performing live. My artworks record a particular moment in time by hand, just as a photo journalist would use a camera to record them. Long-form journalism and features are news articles that are longer in length compared to 'hard' news articles. As such, they usually take a deep dive into their subject matter and have more breathing space for description, commentary and character sketches. They usually have a human-interest angle to them and hence deal with the lives and experiences of real-life people. L.R – Have your portfolio show a body of reportage work covering different sorts of places and scenes. Be aware of how reportage-style illustration is being used in advertising, design and the media.

In a world where our social interactions and experiences of the world increasingly take place online, drawing is increasingly significant as it takes you out into the street and into political places and relationships with who we are drawing. I think that is something we need to bare in mind and be critically aware that there is always the danger of being voyeuristic. I would avoid any prescriptions to say you can draw this but you can't draw that, it's just something to be critically aware of. Choose your location. Make sure you research and develop a shortlist of options to choose from. You need a subject interesting and engaging to you. Knowing as much as you can about the area you choose may foster some interesting narrative angles you may not have considered otherwise.However, traditional journalism is usually objective, constrictive, straightforward distant and detached, which can make it dry and uninteresting. Hence, writers of reportage blend aspects of fiction to make reporting factual events more lively and engaging. Writers of reportage use the first-person narratives to immerse themselves in the story and do not shy away from drama, dialogue, human emotions, personal opinions, character development, vivid imagery and experimentation with plot structure and chronology. Unlike traditional journalism, they focus more on the lives of their individual subjects and how they have been affected by events rather than institutions. Absolutely, the best bit about illustration is having a commission, it’s incredibly reassuring. However, 75% of the places I go are initiated by me. Whilst the Olympic games were actually taking place I had the freedom to move around and respond to emerging stories as they were happening, so a project like that took a lot of research and planning in advance. Following on from that I took on a project to draw at a number of Eastern Orthodox Monasteries in North Eastern Greece through a bursary from the Royal college.

On this trip Butler has drawn a 99-year-old great grandmother who described the horrors of the great famine in 1932-33 and a seven-year-old recovering from brain surgery after being shot in the head.

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Annals of the Former World (1998) by John McPhee (1931-present) charts the geological history of North America done by two decades of research and road trips done by the writer alongside geologists. Personal essay The US slowly started to reintroduce photography to the courtroom, its thought due to the decline in courtroom artists. By 2014, all 50 states allowed the use of courtroom photography. The trouble with a lot of reportage work is it's quite dense and you've got to imagine that translated to newsprint together with all the copy that goes with the story and you're not doing yourself any favours if you make it to intricate.