Full Description
How does drawing shape the truth and our understanding of the visual world? Why has the act of reportage drawing persisted and thrived in our ever-changing media landscape?
This book offers a deep dive into the world of reportage drawing, a world which is provocative, mixed media, transdisciplinary and immersed in the idiosyncratic vision of the artist. Where the traditional orientation of reportage was on the communicative function of the image as a record of an event, contemporary practitioners, largely detached from commissioning structures of the 19th and 20th centuries, now seek to capture more experiential qualities of place and choose locations which have highly personal and political significance. Liberated from old conceptions of reportage drawing as objective and true, artists today embrace subjectivity and are seeking a rich dialogue with their subjects, using drawing to tell important stories about protest, human migration, war, corporate capitalism and homelessness.
Louis Netter distinguishes contemporary reportage drawing from its historical function through a critical exploration of the aesthetic of the sketch, the role of caricature and the nature of experience. Featuring several prominent artists such as Jill Gibbon, who secretly draws in arms fairs across Europe, Mario Minichiello, a highly influential reportage illustrator who has worked for the BBC's Newsnight and The Guardian newspaper among others, renowned reportage illustrator Gary Embury and French reportage artist Loup Blaster, in addition to an exploration of the author's own work, this book shows how the act of drawing can foster new insights about people, places and political realities in often subtle and challenging ways. Part of the Drawing In series, this book opens up reportage drawing practice as a way of understanding our world in a deeper and more personal way.
Contents
Introduction
1. Reportage Drawing: History and the Contemporary Act
2. The graphic construct of Reportage Drawing and the re-creative experiences
3. The perception and reception of drawing
4. The Reductive Line: caricature and comment
5. Experience, place and meaning making
6. The Graphic Construct - Jill Gibbon
7. The Graphic Construct - Mapping my own practice
8. The Graphic Construct - Gary Embury
9. Artist spotlight - Mario Minichiello
10. Artist spotlight - Loup Blaster
11. Artist spotlight - Mercy Kagia
12. Artist spotlight - Dominika Wroblewska
12. The currency of reportage drawing
14. Concluding Comments
Bibliography
Index
