Letters from the field #5 - Season 2 announcement + Call for participation

A new season of research, and how to participate in it

Dear On Lookers,

I came back on Thursday morning from a week-long retreat in Los Angeles where I tried to write an academic paper about Corporate Memphis, had delicious food, and saw the Pacific ocean for the first time. It was a strange experience realizing how much my only relationship with this city had been through so many media representations, maybe even more so than with New York. In an uncanny collapsing of these representations onto reality, my sight seeing highlights included:

• The house from my favourite TV show growing up, Charmed.

• the Oppenheim group’s office from my current favourite show, Selling Sunset.

• The Griffith Observatory, which I only knew from its video game alias, the Galileo Observatory from GTA.

• The Sunset boulevard, from the accordeon book by Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip.

• I looked everywhere for the perfect palm tree to recreate one of my favourite picture by John Baldessari, Wrong, but couldn’t find the right one, so I will have to go back.

Me in front of the Charmed house, Los Angeles

Season 2

Anyway, this letter is not about my holiday, it’s about my research, more precisely the Season 2. Season 1 was all about illustrators, I spent my first 8 months in New York hanging out with them over coffee and drinks, going to book launches, exhibition openings, parties, and renting a spot in a shared studio. But illustrators, while being at the core of this research, as they are at the core of the industry, are only one actor of this big constellation I’m trying to map out in my PhD.

In Season 2, I want to focus on the flip side of the industry, the designers, the art directors, the editors, the production managers, and so on. My goal is to understand how the people in magazines, design studio, advertising agencies, etc. think about (and look at) style, images, and visual culture in general.

Some of the questions I’m asking are: How do art directors talk to editors in a magazines? How do these editors look at images? How do designers make stylistic choices? what do they look at? How do they put together moodboards? What is the communication with clients like? What’s the role of language in coordinating the creation of visuals? How is the economic value of images decided? and so. Many. More.

Call for participation

While it was easy for me to access illustrators lives and illustrators spaces (because I am one too), I need a bit of help with regard to this flip side of the industry. This is why I’m reaching out to all of you who’ve found this newsletter interesting enough so far to subscribe for a bit of help.

I’m looking to get in touch with the aforementioned professionals of the creative industry in New York for two main purposes:

• Conduct interviews. These ethnographic interviews are ideally in person, run for about an hour and are completely anonymous. Participants are welcome to withdraw at any time during or after the process. The content of the interview is mostly about people’s own experiences in the industry and the way they work, what they look at, etc. It’s usually a pretty fun experience and offers a space to put words on things that are usually not often verbalized.

• Observations. Just like I did with the illustrator’s studio I spent 3 months at, I’m looking to spend time (a week, a month, 3 months…) being present in magazines, design studio, advertising agencies to observe how people work, the way they talk about the work during meetings, be part of informal chats at lunch, etc. As the interviews, this process is completely anonymous, I would never name the company, nor the people I work with, etc. I’ve done this before and this is usually a really seamless, non-intrusive process, and it provides the best insights on the creative process.

This is one of the rare research of this scale about this corner of creative industry in New York and the only that focuses directly on art direction/illustration. The ultimate goal after I write my dissertation is to turn it into a book so everyone in the industry can have access to this empirical study of what we do.

SO.

If you or any creative you know are New York-based and are interested in participating to this research, please get in touch! Being able to conduct observations in a work space specifically would be a game changer for this research. I would love to chat and I’m happy to answer any questions and concerns people might have.

Please do share this call for participation widely, and let me know of any rumours you hear of any company amenable to welcome an anthropologist in their studio.

Warmly,

Julien