Letters from the field #4 - Work Work Work

Thinking about work in an illustrator studio in Brooklyn

“What about creativity?” one of my professor, an anthropologist of art, ask me when I’m done presenting my research plan for my fieldwork last year. “Through everything you just said there’s the creative act that you don’t mention, no?”. My omission was intentional. Despite regularly being called the ‘creative industry’, I rarely remember my professional work as an illustrator as particularly creative in the classic sense of ‘creating new ideas’.

My desire to challenge assumptions about how creative the creative industry is came from a desire to value the lives of the people who make images without relying on romantic tropes of self-expression and (neo)liberal values of individuality. Too often, these tropes have been used to justify a winner-takes-all industry in which only a few get to make a decent living while the rest can only hope to fight for scraps. As a result, one’s failure to succeed i…