Digital and hand-drawn animation techniques are increasingly seen in short and feature-length documentaries, interweaving with traditional filming methods and sometimes carrying a whole story from start to finish.

Given that animation has the freedom to represent, stylise, and re-imagine the world, this form lends itself well to documentary stories capturing human experience and a multiplicity of narratives and perspectives.

We will be joined by a panel of seasoned documentary filmmakers and groundbreaking animators who will present a behind-the-scenes look at the artistic techniques applied to recent projects, as well as the broader motivations and challenges to representing reality in animated form.

Speakers to be announced soon.

Bella Honess Roe (moderator) teaches Film Studies at the University of Surrey. She has published extensively on areas in animation, documentary and British cinema and her book Animated Documentary was published in 2013. Prior to entering academia, Bella worked in feature film script development in London and Los Angeles.

Dee Hibbert-Jones is an Academy Award nominated filmmaker and fine artist. She works collaboratively with Nomi Talisman on film, new media and fine art projects that address critical social issues, politics and personal testimony. Hibbert-Jones was awarded the Filmmaker Award with Talisman from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke (2015) and the Gideon award for support to indigent minorities (2016) by the California Public Defenders Association. Hibbert-Jones and Talisman’s most recent animated documentary film Last Day of Freedom won Best Short Documentary at the International Documentary (IDA) Awards 2015, won an Emmy for Northern California, and was nominated for an 88th Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. Hibbert-Jones is an Associate Professor of Art and Digital Art New Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA founder and Co-director of SPARC a research centre for social and environmental justice.

Marie-Margaux Tsakiri-Scanatovits set up the multi-award winning animation studio The Moth Collective along with Daniel Chester and Dave Prosser. After meeting at the Royal College of Art, they formed in 2010 to share a collective passion for all things drawn. The Moth Collective has received acclaim for their imaginative and thought provoking hand-drawn work. They have since worked on a myriad of different projects, covering documentary feature films, commercials, short films, illustrated books and music videos for clients such as The New York Times, The Guardian, WWF, and Headspace.

Katerina Athanasopoulou is a Greek artist living in London who creates animated films for cinema and gallery space. She studied Fine Art at Aristotle University in Greece and graduated with an MA Animation from the RCA in 2002. Her award-winning films have been shown internationally at film festivals and galleries, including Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, Thessaloniki Biennale 5, Holland Animation Film Festival, European Media Art Festival, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb. Works include: Branches of Life (2016), commissioned by Cast Iron Radio and Recording for the Body Of Songs project, supported by Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England; Rupture (2015), commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for The Art of Saving a Life; The Violet Hour (2014), commissioned by the London College of Fashion for a brief set by the Venice Architecture Biennale, within the 2014 Now project; Apodemy (2012), a short film on Emigration and the Economic Crisis, commissioned by the Onassis Foundation, and many more.

Heenali Patel sat down with artist and journalist Molly Crabapple to discuss ‘Scenes from the Syrian War’, her collection of illustrations made in collaboration with Syrian writer Marwan Hisham. Using photos sent via cell phone, Molly recreated rare glimpses of daily life in ISIS-occupied areas of Syria.

Filmed by Adam Barr.

Acclaimed journalist and artist Molly Crabapple has drawn and reported on stories from Guantanamo Bay, Syria, the West Bank, Iraqi Kurdistan and across the United States. With her powerful illustrations she has pushed the boundaries of visual reportage – and established an important place for art in hard news.

On the release of her memoir Drawing Blood, which intersperses testimony of her own artistic and journalistic engagement with full-colour illustrations, we welcome Molly Crabapple to the Frontline Club to reflect on recent projects and to share her personal insight into the use of art as a tool for better understanding and documenting current events. With US presidential primaries now firmly underway, she will discuss her ongoing work on topical home turf issues including policing and the justice system, as well as her experiences covering the effects of conflict across the Middle East.

Molly Crabapple is an artist, journalist, and author of the memoir, Drawing Blood. Called “an emblem of the way art can break out of the gilded gallery” by the New Republic, she has drawn in and reported from Guantanamo Bay, Abu Dhabi’s migrant labor camps, and in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, and Iraqi Kurdistan. Crabapple is a contributing editor for VICE, and has written for publications including The New York Times, Paris Review, and Vanity Fair. She is the winner of a 2015 Front Page Award for her drawings of Aleppo for Vanity Fair, and was shortlisted for a Frontline Award in 2013. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

This event will be chaired by Natasha Lennard, a British-born, New York-based writer of news and political analysis, focusing on justice, power, biopolitics and dissent. She writes regularly for the Intercept, Fusion and Al Jazeera America, and has written for VICE News, The New York Times, Salon, The Nation and Politico, among others. She is editor-at-large at The New Inquiry journal.

Illustration: Molly Crabapple for VICE: ‘What Life is Like Inside the Besieged, War-Torn Syrian City of Aleppo’

At the Frontline Club on Wednesday 16 April illustrator George Butler and features editor for The Guardian and editor of the G2 supplement Malik Meer discussed whether there is room for supposedly more subjective and abstract illustration in hard-news when photography dominates.

Malik Meer and George Butler discuss illustration at the Frontline Club

First, Butler explained what is special about illustration:

“Drawing offers the viewer, the audience, a different perspective. It encapsulates the passing of time in one image, those two or three hours, say, on the street just observing quietly in the corner . . . are invaluable. . . . I didn’t want to go to Aleppo to compete with the photographers, who do a fantastic job capturing the frontline for the front page, . . . I wanted to offer a different angle, a more human fourth dimension . . . to capture a period of time and then distil it into one image.

 

“ . . . Things move, people come and go, and you pick something that you like to draw and perhaps it’s a figure and they then walk off and come back and they’re in a different position. . . . Sometimes that means highlighting one thing. . . . If there’s a particularly interesting character why shouldn’t he be closer to the foreground? And if there’s something that’s not very interesting . . . I draw it smaller and at the back. It’s a very personal thing; if anyone else was to do it they would probably pick different things.”

Do you think people react differently to an illustrator than to a photographer who just shoots a photo and leaves?

“I see it as a very open and honest process, one where people can see over your shoulder see what you’re doing, they recognise their friends, the places that they work. . . . Importantly, they don’t feel threatened. They’re not made to feel uncomfortable or made to pose. . . . What this means is you’re very often afforded access to places that you wouldn’t otherwise be allowed to see.

 

“. . . [It] shows that you care about them, that you’re willing to sit and spend time with them. . . . There’s something very nice about the . . . handmade creative process that comes across because it’s so personal from start to finish.”

Great lecture at the @frontlineclub with @george_butler last night. Fantastic and inspiring artwork. Well worth the trip.

— Alex Wood (@AJ_Wood15) April 17, 2014

An audience member asked, does the activity of drawing act as a barrier, to put some of the emotions you have towards the scene into something?

“Absolutely, I think people have talked about how they can hide behind their camera when these sorts of things happen and the drawing board is a physical barrier. Certainly during the little lad in hospital [with an amputated leg] it felt like it was a way of distracting myself, just copying exactly what’s in front you rather than thinking about it for too long.”

Can illustrations ever be as powerful as photographs?

“I think the photograph is fantastic at its job . . . engaging a huge audience on the front page. But I think if you know a little bit about the subject or if you’ve seen a lot of photographs of the subject, which you sometimes have now then, illustration can be a great, layered way of capturing attention.”

Meer added on why he choose to run Butler’s illustrations in The Guardian instead of photographs:

“We’d run quite a lot of reports from Syria, insider reports, broader political pieces and you resort to the pictures that are available and they are the ones that everyone sees at the time. They do capture incredible moments but the minute you see something like this [illustration] it just captures something else. . . . I think they’re as haunting as classic conflict images.”

George Butler whilst drawing in Syria

But with illustration being such a subjective art form and Butler himself having admitted he leaves things out of an image or brings scenes to the forefront, where does he think the line between style and story should be drawn?

“For me sometimes when I’m on holiday or in a different part of the world, not in Syria, it’s quite nice just to draw things that you know you can make look good . . . but in terms of Syria it was always any kind of opportunity to draw because there was always a story to draw that was as important. . . . I suppose if you’re really true to reportage you’d have the two offering as much fifty–fifty, story and good-looking picture.”

It could be said that because they are such beautiful pictures that they lend a fairy tale-like quality to what is a very present war?

“Obviously as photographers or anybody creative you’ve always learnt to make things look good and yet the things that are in front of you don’t look in any way good. . . . I think people understand that as an artist . . . that you’re very much giving your interpretation of it. . . . I guess it’s just about being as honest to the subject as possible.”

Watch and listen the full discussion below:

The theorist Susan Sontag wrote:

“For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war.”

While our perception and understanding of the 20th century is intrinsically linked to the images of its conflicts, photography’s ever-increasing ubiquity has perhaps desensitise us. If photography was meant to show us our true natures and in so doing shock us into action, then it has failed.

Throughout history, we have sought ways to illustrate our wars. However, the notion of an ‘artist’ who could produce work in real-time for publication was incongruent. Before the telegraph, news from the front line could take days or even weeks to make it home. Likewise the concept of daily newspapers or periodicals only emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The vast majority of illustrations were not produced by artists on the front line but by craftsman in the studio, rendering drawings based on oral accounts or testimonies from those who had fought.

From Goya’s The Disasters of War: Enterrar y callar (Bury them and keep quiet) and Lo mismo (The same).

During the Crimean War (1853–56), the burgeoning newspaper industry coincided with technological advances, marking the first occurrence of what we would call conflict reportage. With the invention of the telegraph, correspondents were able to transmit reports from the field to editors back home almost instantaneously.

One of the first ‘artists’ commissioned to document the effects of war was Roger Fenton. He chose photography over illustration but, to avoid offending Victorian sensibilities, refrained from documenting dead bodies. If the first correspondents and photographers demonstrated restraint with this new medium, the emergence of the war photographer during the American Civil War would make it the most documented conflict of the 19th century. The role of the camera in capturing conflict would only expand in the 20th century.

Roger Fenton’s photographic van and ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death’ in Crimea.

The practicalities of photomechanical reproduction meant that newspapers continued to commission illustrators throughout the 19th century, but artists’ drawings were increasingly based on photographs taken in the immediacy of battle. The inspiration for war artists had shifted from oral histories to photographic templates.

When The War Illustrated was first published at the start of World War I by William Berry, owner of The Daily Telegraph, its focus on illustration over photography saw its circulation peak at over one million. And US generals during World War I and II preferred to enlist artists over photographers in covering frontline conflicts, believing illustrations better expressed the ‘experiences’ of war. The Navy Combat Art Programme even trained artists and illustrators along with regular troops.

However, by the 1930s the popularity of new photographic reportage periodicals, such as Life magazine, began to claim photography as the best way to document conflict. Vietnam became the first ‘photojournalists’ war’ where the true power of the media, let loose without regulation or censorship, saw it fought on televisions and in newspapers, but it also made governments weary of the power of the photographic image.

From the First Gulf War through to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the embargo on images of dead soldiers and the embedding of photojournalists increasingly stunted photography’s ability to function as a tool of truth and to convey the image of conflict objectively. Its objectivity and immediacy, the very attributes that had made it so appealing to editors and audiences alike, were increasingly used by the authorities to sanitise and censor.

Added to this the increasing proliferation and beautification of the war image – the paradigm shift from ‘dead body’ shock to aesthetic object – made Sontag’s assertion that “a photograph is supposed not to evoke but to show” ever more distorted. Perhaps this demonstrated the limitations of photography in a world dominated by photographs.

There is no question that, at its most visceral, artistic depictions of war have the ability to comment on the human condition at its most vulnerable and nihilistic. Goya’s The Disasters of War prints still resonate – not just as a record of the terror inflicted during Napoleon’s occupation of Spain – but as universal indictment of the horrors of conflict. And yet Goya, unlike 20th century war photographers, never witnessed first-hand the horror he so accurately articulated.

However, just as the US generals viewed the suitability of illustration to capture the experience of war, perhaps Goya’s prints, although not intended as an objective account of what happened, made sense out of the madness of war.

In a time when images of death are everywhere and the demand for up-to-date news coverage can be satisfied by anyone with a phone, perhaps the whisper of the illustrated image really is louder than the shout.

Our upcoming event, In the Picture: Illustration in Times of War, with George Butler will be held on Wednesday 16 April 2014, at 7:00pm. Find out more and book online here.

Photography dominates the news in print and online. It is an immediate, vivid and mostly objective medium for portraying current events. In comparison, illustration is seen as more subjective and tends to be confined to softer, more abstract stories.

But is there still room for illustration in hard-news stories?

We are flooded with images taken by cameras and phones which often struggle to have the impact that they did 50 years ago. In a society that has become so desensitised to photographs of war, can illustration be used to better encapsulate a situation and connect with the viewer?

In 2013 George Butler‘s drawings from war-damaged Syrian towns were used in The Guardian, The Times and on the BBC World News. He will be joining us to present his work and talk about how he produces it. 

He will be joined by Malik Meer, features editor for The Guardian and editor of the G2 supplement, to discuss the appeal of his illustrations.