3 Questions with reference to Laurence Zeegan

Burkina Faso for Oxfam and The Guardian 05-12-2012

 

How do we define Illustration?
What makes good Illustration?
What can Illustration do?

With reference to Laurence Zeegan’s 2012 ‘Where is the content? Where is the comment?’ and his 2010 ‘Computer Arts 0174 Illustration Now!’

Ian Bray – Oxfam’s senior press officer contacted Olivier Kugler to ask if he would be interested in doing a series of drawings highlighting the food crisis in the Sahel Zone. Kugler spent a week in Burkina Faso, travelling gathering reference material including photos, sketches and interviews. From this he created a 5 page series of drawings that were published in the Guardians G2 suppliment as a visual report of the 2million people at risk of hunger in Sahel. Oxfam aimed to raise 66 million pounds for food and clean water as part of their ‘Food Crisis in Sahel’ appeal.

Laurence Zeegan boasted in 2010 that the purpose of illustration was to ‘communicate, persuade, inform, educate and entertain with clarity, vision and style.’  The reason I chose Olivier Kugler’s work is because it is aesthetically and visually pleasing, it draws you in to the characters and the scene that he sets; but as you begin to read the text he creates a narrative of the life of the characters involved with purpose to persuade, inform, educate and communicate his concept. As a reportage illustrator Kugler is most successful because his lines are simple, layered, his compositions are very well thought out as well as blocks of colour where necessary. You could almost call him a journalist, in the way that he travels gathers his evidence and feeds it back to us as an audience.

What I like most about illustration is that we are able to communicate a message with our understanding of the circumstance, depicting a concept and creating emotion in the viewers. What I think Kugler does best is creating a sense of narrative and personality to the characters that he is interviewing so we get a real sense of the struggle, which enforces emotion in us and pushes us to act and help. Oxfam and The Guardian clearly felt he was successful at this also. Kugler is certainly not ‘so entrenched in navel-gazing and self-authorship’ he is not making art for arts sake, he is not creating work that will just ‘take pride of place on the coffee table’ but rather to try and help change the world. In 2012 Zeegan described illustrators as creating work that was ‘all about the materials, rather than the message. All about the quantity rather than the quality.’ As if they had been sucked into a world of commercial art and this coffee shop culture that sits back, self-absorbed, letting the world pass them by and doing nothing to make a stand.

 I definitely feel that Kugler’s work speaks for itself that Zeegan could not be more wrong. Illustration is not simply a drawing. I do not draw simply because I want to make a nice drawing that will sit under my bed and be forgotten about. I am drawing for a purpose, to communicate something, to work towards a brief and display a message, a narrative.  Kugler is not replicating what he see’s infront of him but rather selectively picking out the bits that he feels will be most engaging and reflect the concept and layering them together with text. If the Guardian just wanted images that were ‘function following form’ they would hire a photographer.

Semiotic Analysis with reference to 'Understanding Media Semiotics' Danesi, R. (2002)

George Butler

Meat Market - Azerbaijan, Baku 2008

Reportage Illustration

 

If I saw the words ‘Meat Market’ in my head I would think of a butcher stood in a striped apron, white overalls white hat, a strong smell, slabs of meat and meat hanging from hooks. What I think George Butler does so cleverly here is brings together this myth perfectly through index and symbols and his use of colour with splashes of media to immediately make it recognizable without title.

We don't even question this image or what it is because it has its validity. The question I am raising is why? What makes this a good representation of a meat market? Butler has not gone over the top with his media and colour adding lots of detail and making a packed out reportage scene but rather been selective with his lines and picking out the symbols he felt were most necessary when observing the scene.

The shapes that he uses compositionally hanging imply meat hanging from hooks although not detailed drawings of meat or proportionally correct we get an understanding that they are meat because of the myth of what meat looks like or should be shaped like and this is repeated within the illustration used as codes. These codes are as Danesi says 'a recipe' like basic ingredients for us to create our understanding of something. Along with the meat are the splashes of red colour indexing blood dripping. This may be red ink or could actually be blood meat used I am not sure but it adds to the context of the piece and represent the idea of rawness and flesh.

The connotation of the piece is that the meat market is not as you would immediately imagine with the jolly butcher in his apron; but rather a tired looking, miserable working man in an environment that appears not fit to work in. The blood splashes are not selective and are used in any area which could suggest that it is maybe an unsanitary workplace and uncontrolled - not a place we would desire to buy our food from. One of the 'blood drippings' is also a darker red colour which suggests blood that is not fresh.

The signifier is a line drawing of a meat market stall in Azerbaijan with red ink splashes and selective use of line. The signified is connotations of working men that are trying to make a living, with no pride in selling their meat as it is slapped along the counters and hanging from anywhere possible. Green and brown coloured ink index old meat, perhaps mould, and dirt.
'Connotations is powerful because it evokes feelings and perceptions about things.' This definitely rings true when looking at this illustration. Immediately I get the feeling that this meat market is not a place I would like to visit, it looks dirty and bloody and the server looks miserable. His hands are behind his back, he is not smiling and inviting suggesting he is fed up and over-worked. Straight away Butler has created this atmosphere and evoked these feelings within me by a simple line drawing which is amazing. Illustrations are not photographs, George Butler has not simply drew what he sees exactly but rather been selective in the symbols he feels are most powerful and would evoke these feelings, and exaggerated those adding his media as metaphors for blood and flesh.