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Dear reader, in this autumn renewal of The (Im)posture, let me introduce you to new type of letter that will eventually be sent to paid subscribers, The Likeness. With The Likeness, I’m pairing an illustration with another work of art, usually not within the graphic arts, to explore what the association can teach us about illustration as an art form and the many ways illustrators push the boundary of what an image can be.

For our first experiment, I’m excited to show your a work by one of my favourite illustrators, Gizem Vural who graciously accepted to be paired with a series of photographs by Eadweard Muybridge.

New work about 'animals extinction' to Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam exhibition Lost and Not Found. (SOI62 Uncomissioned Category Silver Medal)

"Sallie Gardner," owned by Leland Stanford; ridden by G. Domm, running at a 1.40 gait over the Palo Alto track, 19th June, 1878. Shot by Eadweard Muybridge

Vural’s image was created for the 2019 exhibition “Lost And Not Found” curated by Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam. The exhibition was about the lost species due to human imapct on ecosystem and Vural’s work focused on a species of Butterfly. Shot in 1878, Muybridge series has since become the most famous example of chronophotography, a technique in which several cameras placed along the path of an animated object are triggered automatically, allowing to decompose its movement.

In both images, visual representations allow us to see something that would be otherwise invisible. Muybridge photographs show a reality that goes too fast to be perceptible while Vural’s illustration shows a reality gone too soon. Unlike comics or cinema, we don’t tend to associate illustration with time, which we usually understand as a single image = a single moment. Yet, Vural’s work breaks this rule constantly and fragments the frame to make space for more time.

This visual mechanism is a reminder that illustration is about visual conventions and how to play with them. The modern expectation that a frame is equal to 1 unit of time has not always prevailed. In The Tribute Money (1420), Masaccio depicts the story of Saint Peter finding a coin in a fish mouth and paying the temple tax. In this image, not only 3 moments of the story are depicted in one frame, they are also not sequential. Skilled illustrators walk the fine line between using conventional visual strategies and create new ways of visualizing ideas without losing the spectator, which Vural does brilliantly in this image.

But the depiction of time is not the only interesting feature of her illustration. While Muybridge’s photos show a moving animal in a rigid grid (the image was used wildly for scientific purposes), the illustration depicts an immobile butterfly whose surrounding are dynamic, moving. The geometric grid becomes the focus of the image, as the ineluctable march of human development on the natural world. The rigidity of the black grid becomes the human antithesis of the organic, soft colours and shapes of the butterfly’s natural world. Moreover, using the western convention of left to right reading, Vural spatially suggests the acceleration of time by shrinking the bottom right frames. This reduction of both time and space, the graphic embodiment of the climate crisis, slowly crushes the butterfly that no longer has the space to visually exist in the image.

This is what drew me to this image in the first place. The subject of the image (the butterfly) and the way it is depicted (through this compression of the grid) are completely dependent on one another to convey meaning. What the image shows and how it does so are inseparable. Pushing the limits of a medium is part of an artist’s work, which is not often encouraged in illustration.

But illustrators are at the core of what visual culture can be, what an image can do and how visually literate an audience can get and Gizem Vural shows all these concerns in one, single illustration.

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The (Im)posture

P.S. The Likeness - Gizem Vural : Eadweard…