Letter from the field #3 - The anthropology of illustration

🌴 How I explain the lives of NYC creatives to an anthropologist

The new year just started and with it my 6^th month conducting research in New York’s creative industry. And just like this period of the year, my research journey feels like it’s both at the end and the beginning of something. As the winter deepens, so do my relationships with people here, my role has shifted from unexpected voyeur to habitual observer to sometimes welcomed participant. After 5 months, part of me feels like I have too much to think about already and another part feels I have nothing at all. Some people ask me what I have learned so far. What have I learned? I have learned countless things; I have understood very few. I’m just starting to know what questions to ask.

That may feel disappointing to some (I’ve been so annoyingly present in many people’s lives and understood nothing?!) but I’ve been surprised by the expansive richness of the field. My full-time job has been trying to make sense of this richness. Who knows who, who admires who, why, how people meet, how people talk, how they see, why some care about this research and why some don’t, what categories people use to understand their world, how these differ from a group to another, how they think of the future, what do they hope, what are they worried about, and so on and so forth.

At the AI-AP party (my first), an illustrator couldn’t believe I was a researcher studying illustrators, she seemed flabbergasted by the idea. In truth, she was not the only one I met who was sceptical about why an anthropologist from a fancy old British university would care about illustrators in New York. Most times, I simply say that I used to be an illustrator, and this circular answer is usually enough to make people accept my interest so we can move along in our conversation. But this is not the truth, at least not most of it. My experience as an illustrator has just been an excuse and a point of entry into a world that I think is truly special and that has a tremendous impact on our visual culture at large.

About a month ago, I was talking to my supervisor, an anthropologist working with the Korowai people in West Papua, Indonesia, on a video call about my progress. I described the lives of the people here, what they do, how they talk about images, etc.

‘This all sounds very exotic’, He said.

The notion that the lives of creatives in NYC is exotic to anyone might surprise you. Knowing that most of my audience here are creatives, let me share with you how I talk about the people I came to meet in the past six months to a fellow anthropologist. This shift of perspective, this exoticization of the creative industry, might be an interesting exercise.  

Every day in the US, American see countless drawn images, illustrations. On the packaging of things they eat, the newspaper and magazines they read, the brands and advertising they consume and identify with or the covers of the books they buy. These illustrations are ubiquitous, yet also somehow invisible. Most people don’t really notice them, and even fewer know about those who made them. Yet, peeling off each image to look underneath it reveals much drama, tensions, money, and the life work of so many people. Let’s call them the image people.

The image-people is a made up category comprising different groups that don’t necessarily share much, apart from their engagement with one object, images. That engagement can take many forms, like making images, but also just looking at them, or paying for them. I study in particular two sub-groups of the image people. The first group is named “illustrators” (lit. those who shed light, illuminate). Illustrators are typically thought to be people who make images for money, but from my own observations, they make images even when they are not paid for it. Each illustrator doesn’t just randomly make images, they make images that somehow, despite being all different, are understood to be similar in some respect. They call that overall similarity a “style”, and most of the time each person has one.

To be honest, it is still unclear to me what style is, as everyone seems to have different definitions, when they even have definitions at all. Illustrators can spend years, decades even, developing such “style”, and other members of that group tend to identify people with the images they make. The images they make then become sort of fragments of themselves, tiny ambassadors in a way, they look like their makers, and sometimes their maker looks like them too —and again, despite people outside this group thinking that they just make images for money, most of this happens outside of paid work. Within this group, people can often look at an image and know who made it, to them, seeing images is often seeing the process, the people behind it. Sometimes though, other illustrators might copy someone else’s work —consciously or not. About plagiarism cases, illustrators talk in terms of both theft and impersonation. This is interesting because to us anthropologists the division between the things you steal (commodities) and those you impersonate (people) is quite an important distinction in what constitute social life.

When everything goes well and no one is plagiarised, illustrators get money for their work in a very specific way called ‘licensing’. It’s an economic system whereby someone pays an illustrator for an image based on the usage they’re going to make of that image (depending on how long, on how big a territory and on how many media). Once the usage expires, the image then returns to its maker unless otherwise agreed. Unlike regular commodities that you can buy once and own forever, the images illustrators make are meant to always return their makers, maybe because of that special relationship between them I mentioned earlier. In any case, this means the images can circulate very far away from their makers, and normally retain a certain marker of their identity, usually in the form of a clear copyright (©) but most of the time simply by the sheer virtue of style. A trained eye can trace an image to the person who made it, but who has such skill apart from illustrators?

Well, this leads us to the second group I’m working with, the art directors[1]. Art directors are tasked with matching images with texts —all sorts of texts, not just editorial articles but also brands, briefs, etc.— and in that way they’ve been described by other anthropologists as “image brokers”. But it’s not really pictures they’re interested in, not in the sense of already existing things that they’d buy from illustrators. Rather, they look at illustrators’ work, their style, judge whether it is a “good a fit” for a particular project, then hire them to create a new image, in the continuation of that illustrator’s style. In this whole process, my preliminary observations show that art directors are best at translating language into visual and visual into language. They read texts and think of illustrations, see sketches and talk about them to editors, take feedback and turn them into productive feedback for illustrators to make images with… If there is a divide between text and image, linguistic and visual signs, art directors are tasked bridge it. In that way they are sort of alchemists, turn one substance into another.

Whatever is happening in that alchemic process, I haven’t observed yet —as in all societies some spaces are guarded, and it takes time to be let in. It’s in this process that is shaped the relations that then become part of everyone’s daily interactions with images. How do they decide that this shape is appropriate for a radical leftist magazine but that colour palette for a tech company is still a mystery to me, how people every day identify with an aesthetic or another.

But as we’ve seen, in the work of the illustrators, the distinction between images and persons is not a clear cut one. So, what does that mean when an image (a thingperson) gets purchased? Does that affect the thing or the person or both? Does the person of organization that buys the image impacts who the person is socially? People who might call someone a “sell out” based on who they work for or what they work look like might say so. Similarly, we can say that images come in and out of fashion over the years, but can a person go out of fashion? When people and images are to tied together, the things that happen to one tends to happen to the other. When an image (thingperson) go out of fashion, it might also mean a person is going out of business. And just like that, the realms of the aesthetic and that of the economics collapse into each other.

This short account of these two groups we’re so familiar with might seem odd and ask weird questions. That’s the point. Being so familiar with the industry myself, I constantly need to remind myself to unlearn things (if that’s ever possible) and try my best to ask the questions someone completely new to it would ask. The result is indeed an exotic account of a strange group of people in a big metropolis who dedicate their lives to making and looking at images, commenting about them as they are people, and meeting people through their images first.

I think these are lives worth understanding because they are at the foundation of how things look everywhere, every day. When someone reads an article because they’ve been drawn to it by an image, when they buy a yogurt because the packaging tells them it’s healthy or for kids, when they go on an institution’s website and judge of its trustworthiness based on its illustrations’ aesthetics, what they look at is most likely someone’s lifework, a piece of personhood made image, made commodity.

The image-people might be invisible (and underpaid), yet in the image-saturated world we live in, their work lives on our retina from the moment we open our eyes the moment we close them.

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[1] Bear in mind that sometimes these groups overlap, it’s not uncommon for an illustrator to become an art director, and not impossible, although less common for an art director to become an illustrator.