Letter from the field #1 — The people image

🗽 Some insights from my first month in NYC

I’ve moved to New York a month ago to spend the year with illustrators, art directors, agents, lawyers, designers, machine learning engineers, editors, teachers, etc. as part of my PhD. All these people are connected by their engagement with one object, images. Particularly illustrations.

I moved here with one question : How do different people look together —and sometimes against each other— at the same thing?

In this section of the newsletter, I won’t be making any point or drawing conclusions like I might in essays. Rather, I’d like it to be a space where I get to share the ongoing process of thinking with the people I meet “in the field” as anthropologists like to say. This space is an interface, a way to make my research a bit more transparent and a bit more collaborative.

A PhD skeleton

Since I got here, I’ve been introduced to so many communities, groups of peers and groups of friends. People drawing for fun, other drawing for work, most carefully balancing the two every day. Since my art school days, I hadn’t been surrounded with that many artists on a daily basis,.I had forgotten how casually some can make the most beautiful drawing over a pint and scrap it all off laughing because the final image wasn’t the most important part of its making.

Moving to a place like New York, where I “know” a lot of people I never met, is a strange experience. Over the years, I’ve known and admired and followed many illustrators on social media. I’ve looked at their work, learned from their illustrations, secretly reproduced some of their elements in a corner of a sketchbook to process my envy into something more productive. These years of mutual follows and likes and DMs created a form of intimacy with their images despite never meeting their makers.

I highly recommend Frog Farm’s events, pure joy.

Maybe this is because of my own reckoning of putting so many faces on previously known images, but I’ve been very sensitive to the ways people and their images interact, circulate and become entangled and disentangled with one another. During a studio visit, an illustrator shows me someone’s work and tells me about their personality, almost as if we were looking at a photograph of the person. Another time someone told me I looked like my work, I hope this doesn’t mean I look flat and minimal, as it as often been described.

“She’s great, a really lovely person” she says as she points to an image.

Images and people. Maybe the best example of what I mean by this happened early during my first week here. I met with two illustrators I knew (from having met both their images and them before) for drinks. As we sit at the table of the bar’s patio, one of them takes out a small sketchbook and proceeds to draw while we speak before passing it on. I realize I've never casually drawn like this with friends, or a long time ago. Truthfully, I’m a bit panicked. I make a character, very formulaic, very typical of ‘my style’ and I'm a bit ashamed of how bound to this expectation of how my work should look like I am, even in the intimacy of this shared page.

I think one of them senses it too, and he proceeds to add, unceremoniously, to my drawing. My character gets granted a cute face, hands, feet, a football and a Nike logo. With a smile he tells me 'I'm sorry Julien but clearly that was missing'. We laugh, and the drawing and chatting proceeds, only now I feel much more relaxed. As I’m writing my notes about the evening that night, I realize I'm actually really touched by this joint drawing session. It felt intimate, pressure-less, a reminder that drawing isn't always just for work and performance, that it can be silly and weird and ugly and just for the sake of its own process. It's a lesson I too often forget as I've learned to derive validation from my professional success and to associate drawing with just that.

“Oh, you went to RISD too?”

I'm also moved because through that intervention on my drawing, they make an intervention in our social relationship. Like teasing someone, modifying my drawing felt like an invitation to relax and let go of the social persona that my social media images perform for me. It’s rare for someone to alter someone else’s image, in our professional lives, it would be an infringement on our moral rights. But as we keep drawing on each other’s images, the conversation unfolds less formally than it did before the sketchbook appeared, something outside the page is also happening. I’m reminded of sociologist Erving Goffman’s famous work on identity as performance : “We are all just actors trying to control and manage our public image, we act based on how others might see us.”

That night around the sketchbook, our images were not a facade but a way in, and as my minimal, flat character grew wonky hands and a branded t-shirt, our relationship grew friendlier.

I’m so excited for the months ahead, for the images and the people I’m about to meet and spend time with. If you’re in New York and want to chat, do reach out. In the meantime, I hope this space will shed some light on the process of thinking anthropologically about images, for you as for me.