5 books on images, the people who make them, and the people they make
A reading list for a creative end of year
I was recently talking with a creative director about reading and its importance for creatives. While obviously the medium a lot of them feel more comfortable with is visual, the first one they come in contact for every project is most likely textual. And as an assignment culminates in an image, the actual process is steeped in language, from the brief, the article or the book illustrator reads, to the notes they write under their sketches to the feedback from the editor and art director. As an illustrator, this means learning how to read is just as an important skill as knowing how to draw. Yet, as this creative director was telling me, reading is rarely a part of most design/illustration teaching.
Anyway, this is not an essay on reading, this is a shopping list.
When it comes to reading lists for image makers, the list is endless and often annoyingly trivial. If you’ve been here for a while, you already know how I feel about giving tips to illustrators and why I’ll be taking a different route. For this holiday break, I propose to treat yourself or a fellow creative industry worker to a book about the people who make images, and the images that make people. These suggestions are not going to help you get more clients, but they might give you a deeper understanding of the cultural systems in which creative labour is embedded today. Which, in my opinion, is the best way to develop a stronger sense of authorship and fulfillment over one’s work as well as a greater critical thinking about the conditions in which images are made.
These are not easy read, they are ethnographic or historical investigation in different aspects of the creative industry, in the US and elsewhere. But hey, I feel strongly about creatives being intellectual figures in their own right who have other concerns than survival, sue me. These might be challenging books as they also de-center individuals to focus on larger social narratives. But in my experience, and in line with this newsletter, realizing that my own successes and failures as a ‘creative’ were not only my own responsibility but part of larger systems felt really good and lifted a weight off of my shoulders.
Ok, I’m done with my spiel, here are the books that I think are a great to grow a different understanding of the creative industry, art, and image making in general.
Lily Chumley - Creativity Class: Art School and Culture Work in Postsocialist China
Lily Chumley is probably the closest anthropologist out there to the work I do. She applies linguistic and semiotic anthropology to the study of Chinese creative industry and in this book particularly Chinese art schools and the prep schools that precedes them. She shows how both the tradition of Maoist realism and the more recent incentive to foster innovation in a knowledge economy both co-exist in the current teach of art in China. Through 2 year ethnography in prep schools (where realist drawing is taught) and in art schools (that teach to be ‘creative’ individuals), the book outlines the political, economic and cultural conditions that shape how artists learn but also how the institutionalization of creativity and the arts shapes in turn these conditions.
I recommend this book to anyone who’s interested in art schools, the relation between politics and art and the Chinese creative market.
Howard Becker - Art Worlds
I like to say that what social scientists do is just show you how we really live our lives, in contrast to the fictions and the myths we routinely tell ourselves about how we live. This book by the sociologist of art Howard Becker is a must read to anyone who’s tired of the common narratives of art being this mysterious individual practice, removed from the social and economic world, made by geniuses. I’ve already written a whole review here so I’ll be brief. This book will show you that the word ‘art’ is just an honorific term we use to separate the deserving from the undeserving and not a descriptive term for something that really exist. It will show you how conventional even the most radical artworks are and how social the art of individual geniuses is.
It’s actually a really accessible book and probably if there’s only one book you read from this list, this might be the one to consider. Great for anyone interested in art and different narratives about it.
Zeynep Gürsel - Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation
Image Broker is my bedtime Bible, but I’m extremely biased because my current fieldwork research is extremely similar to Gürsel’s. This book follows the work of photo-editors in different NYC’s newspapers in the early 2000s, as the Irak war unfolded. Shedding light on what she calls the ‘infrastuctures of representation’, Gürsel shows how a picture becomes a news image and how news image create the events they’re supposed to merely represent. From newsrooms to wire-services to festival, this is a brilliant investigation in a usually really opaque and gatekeepy spaces that will undoubtedly teach you so much about what’s at stake behind the scenes. With rich transcripts of conversations between photo editors, editors and photojournalists, reading this book feels like being a fly on the wall of the NYC’s biggest newspapers.
For anyone who’s ever worked in the editorial illustration/photography world or anyone interested in how the images we see, especially during far away conflicts, are manufactured behind closed doors.
Michele Bogart - Art, Advertising and the borders of art
This one has been one of my favourite book of my first year of PhD and helped me so much in thinking about the history of the creative industry. Prof. Bogart is a historian and in this book she lays out the whole history of illustration and advertising from the turn of the century onward. She outlines the creation of the Society of Illustrators as a gentlemen’s club aiming to ‘masculinize’ the profession, the emergence of the figure of the art director and the cultural capital that they sought to accrue through the mobilization of particular aesthetics, or the role of illustrators in US propaganda during WWI. It’s a fascinating book and a must read for anyone working in the illustration world. This is our history, and it is so rare to see it articulated so carefully and more importantly in a way that doesn’t gloss over its political and economic conditions.
Perfect for every illustrator, designer, art director, advertising or magazine history nerd.
Ursula Nordstrom - Dear Genius
Last but not least, a wild card in this list of academic books. Ursula Nordstrom was the director of Harper's Department of Books for Boys and Girls from 1940 to 1973 and the editor/art director of Margaret Wise Brown, Tomi Ungerer, Shell Silverstein, Maurice Sendak and so many more. This book is a collection of her letters to these authors and illustrators about their work, giving feedback, asking for revisions, praising them, asking for new work, etc. Nordstrom not only raised the bar of what children literature could be but reading this book raises the bar for any editor/art director who works with artists. Her critical eye and witty sentences are a delight and I can not recommend this enough.
Perfect for anyone who read or write or draw or edit or art direct. Period.
Voilà! I hope this list will have taken you off the beaten paths and made you excited to take a break from this insane year. I am sure looking forward to a pause myself. I might squeeze in a last letter before the end of the year so until then, take care and good reading.
Hi! I found your Substack in the “Office Hours” segment related to growth…I’m still very new to Substack, and not a meteoric-growth account by any stretch, but these are 3 things that I have seen continue to directly result in new subscribers, even when my actual weekly post hasn’t generated any. I hope these are helpful in any small way - and for what it’s worth, I’m glad to have found your letter to add to my reading list!
1. Subscribing to new Substacks myself. I try to look for new Stacks about once a week. If I’m interested in their Substack, they’re also often interested in mine. New eyes can also lead to Recommendations, which then lead to more new eyes :) - and of course, recommending others where you can also helps here, as they are likely to recommend you as well. I was surprised the portion of my (small) list of subscribers that came straight from a few recommendations.
2. Notes. I try to spend time on Notes daily, even if it’s just a few minutes. I re-stack letters that I enjoy from my reading list, with a note about what I liked or a quote from the letter. Also, a couple of days after I publish, I re-stack my own letter with an excerpt quoted. I’ve found that, often, accounts I’ve never seen before will first like or follow on Notes, and then later Subscribe.
3. Drop cards/direct emails (as often as opportunity presents itself). I’ve resigned myself to the reality that finding new people who might be interested in my newsletter just does mean reaching out to people "outside"! So I kind of push myself to be more intentionally out-going about that within the bounds of being socially acceptable. 🤣
Thank you so much for compiling this list! Based on your description, I asked for Dear Genius for Christmas and it has been such an excellent read.
I am an illustrator and have collected many of the children's books she had a hand in so I am starstruck by all the excellent people she got to work with over the years! Fun fact (for me), it turns out we went to the same boarding school (roughly 7 decades apart). Thank you again!