Letter from the field #2 - Fragments
🐚 Splintered ideas on sight, style, labour, and design
What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all the four of them to me? And me to you?
Gregory Bateson, Mind And Nature
Like any learning process, fieldwork has its ebbs and flows. August was a felicitous month of flow, discovering New York City, its people and places, each encounter bringing a —maybe naive— feeling of clear understanding. In September, the tide of meaningfulness receded, leaving on my mind everything I would learn that month scattered like fragments of iridescent shells, appealing but shattered. This is a normal process, so I’m told.
Turning inchoate forms into neat patterns is a thrill and making sense an ecstatic experience, albeit a rare one. During the first year of the PhD in anthropology, we’ve learned to ask questions. And when we would ask questions to our professors, they’d answer by reformulating them into even more complex questions, and so on and so forth. In many ways, this was a micro version of what it is to do fieldwork. I ask people questions, but each of their answers blooms into more questions, and at times it feels I’m getting further and further away from figuring out any meaningful pattern in that inchoate cacophony.
It’s alright. It’s part of the job to weather the meaningless storm. So today I’m only offering splinters of insights, shimmering bits that I found fascinating in the murky waters of the past month but that I can’t quite put together yet.
1. Style
No one seems to know (or care to know) what style is. In fact, this absence of definition maybe the only thing in common between illustrators and computer scientists. Style seems to exist mostly as something to do, and something to do things with. Some illustrators might resent focus on style, as the concept have been associated with the superficial, the corporate, and more recently the reproducible. To computer scientists, style is a mean to an end, a way to push the limits of certain machine learning models through the task of disentangling form from content. In this sense, there is something in the concept of style that is challenging to everyone, for different reasons. What is about style then, that makes it such a repelling or attractive subject? What does it teach us about images, how we see them and what they are made of? Is style a ‘real’ component of images or is it a modality of their perception? And how do AI practices of style interact with illustrators’ own practices of style?
2. Identity
I’ve been thinking a lot about what I would call the ‘aesthetics of identity’. By that I mean the ways artists inhabiting positions of marginality, whether on the grounds of their sexual orientation, gender, race, ethnicity, etc. can be asked by clients to perform their identity in their work. This often happens during socially (and commercially) sanctioned reminders that such people exist and their stories have been erased, like pride month, black history month or Asian Pacific Islander month. Some illustrators have shared stories of the complexities of representation in these contexts, and how their identities, personal stories and work became commodified. But what does it mean for an image to look like a whole group’s identity? What relations do individual styles, cultural identities and aesthetic forms maintain? How are these relations embedded in the corporate appetite for commodifying identities, particularly marginalized ones? These stories articulate relations between images and people that I hadn’t thought of, but that now feel so important.
3. Labour
Illustration doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it’s connected to many other creatives jobs in various ways. In the past month, the Writer’s Guild of America ended its strike after an new agreement was signed, including clauses regarding AI. Illustrators do not have such a direct form of representation as a trade union1 and this often hides the fact that illustration is a form of labour, and illustrators are workers. Being so focused on semiotic processes of meaning making myself, I tend to forget about this as well. I’ve recently been trying to understand the labor laws regulating the work of freelance artists in the US and how they might shape the practices of illustrators, down to the very notion of style itself. Would style be the same concept if it wasn’t tied to copyright, and by extension to labour and its regulation? what kind of labour is stylistic labour? How do the work conditions of freelance artists shape the way they produce work, and ultimately what their work look like? (We caught glimpses of these entanglements with the Corporate Memphis backlash for example, and understandings of its aesthetic as indexing corporateness) . These are things I’m just starting to think through as I’m talking to people about their work with images.
4. Full-time
On a related note, I need to face the fact that some categories I had planned on using to circumscribe the groups I would work with were really biased. My original plan was to focus on ‘full time’ illustrators, without thinking too much about what that entailed in a city like New York. I’d always been a ‘full-time’ illustrator, without any other jobs, in Montreal, but my rent was cheap and my clients were paying me in US dollars. Yet I would have barely been able to afford a life in NYC with my biggest year of income. Here, almost none of the illustrators I spoke to are ‘full time’ in the absolute sense of the term. Most have jobs on the side, as teachers, art directors, etc. or are supported by partners or family. This seemingly innocuous category of ‘full-time’ illustrator actually articulated so many values I had internalized about creative work and definitions of success. Now I need to find ways to let go of this idea I had and make space of other narratives of illustrative work, other stories of what it means to make images as a job in New York today.
5. Seeing
My research investigates how we might not all see the same thing when looking at the same image. Yet, this work relies on my ability to test this intuition in real life, but how can I look at looking? So far, I rely on language. People tell me anecdotes they find completely mundane, and I catch a glimpse of how looking is socially distributed. Some sparse examples:
A student in class shows an illustration of a teddy bear hanging by the paw in a sticky, dark drop of liquid. "I showed it to a coworker” she explains “and he asked 'is he wearing gloves?' and I was like 'No his hand is stuck in blood you idiot!'”. That student learned that making images is about understanding that some people might not be as visually literate as others, and to manage others’ ways of seeing.
On several occasions, illustrators have shared that they changed what they felt were significant stylistic features of their work in the past years, and to their surprise no one noticed. One even mentions switching from analogue to digital tools without anyone seeing the difference. This echoes interesting work in the psychology of attention, and how prior knowledge shapes our attention.
I obviously already talked about plagiarism here, but how latest cases led to disagreement on the nature of similarity between two images points to crucial differences in perception of images. Understanding why differences in perception emerge might tell us something about how looking is socially organized.
To sum up, I sense that something is happening in the ways we learn to see things, in particular images, and how we learn that we don’t always see the same thing. Now the question is, how do I document these ways of seeing?
6. Perspectives
As my research is about understanding multiple perspectives on the same object, I’m becoming more and more aware of my own, and how it shapes how I understand things. As an illustrator, I assumed that illustration was at the centre of everyone’s focus. I’m realizing now how far away from the truth this is. I do think illustration is socially at the centre of people’s engagement with style, but it might not be at the centre of their daily concern. Talking to designers and art directors working in agencies, I realized that my concern with illustration didn’t quite resonated with them as it did with illustrators. After all, no designer in these contexts works exclusively with illustration. Illustration is only one aesthetic resource among many, alongside typefaces, colour palettes, etc. to contribute to specific projects. How then to account for this de-centring of illustration while it is at the centre of my own research? Is illustration even a relevant category in design contexts? is style? What are the particular ways of talking about and looking at images in each group, and do they differ from my own?
Voilà. You got a tour of the never-ending questions within questions within questions romanesco broccoli that is fieldwork. I collect this fragments, at times frustratingly, in the hope that some of them will eventually connect with others, knowing that even if all of these were to ever form a whole, it would probably look like another question.
If any of this shimmering bits resonated with your own experiences or questions, do comment, reach out or share this letter. The purpose of this PhD journal is to make the research process transparent and interactive and I’d love it to be the start of new conversations.
Although there are some broader unions as well as specific advocacy groups that are doing amazing work, for example the Freelance Solidarity Project, the Freelancers Union, or the Graphic Artist Guild.
This was so fun to read! I particularly resonated with no. 4, about full-time creative work and what the typical definition of success looks like. The context of where the illustrator is living plays a big role in their identity, I often consider if moving to a bigger city would provide more opportunities? But then that means sacrificing other resources (such as time or physical space to work). Interesting to ponder :)
Love these thoughts, the one that particularly struck me was no. 5.
As a longtime artist, I've been trained to 'see.' Part in jest, with a mix of curiosity, people in my life will ask me what color certain things are, because they don't have need for the nuanced vocabulary of it like I do in my work. They find it an amusing party trick, of sorts, telling me they don't notice the slightest difference between shades I give different names. It's a strange thought to me that others don't see or pay attention the way artists do.