Bill's sketchbook Images courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle.

BILL BITES: THE SUBJECTIVE IN VISUAL JOURNALISM

Issue #4, by Bill Russell

In Alain de Botton's book, The Art of the Travel (2002) the author describes a tour he took around Arles, France to the sites where Vincent van Gogh painted. Throughout the tour an Australian in a big black hat complained the whole time that the real scenes they visited didn't look like van Gogh's paintings. De Botton explains that van Gogh was aware that people criticized his modernist interpretation of reality. Yet he felt passionately that his portraits and scenes required a deeper reality – a felt reality in which some distortion, omission and substitution is required. Van Gogh's position made me wonder how subjective I am allowed to be as a newspaper illustrator. Typically I do interpretive or conceptual pictures but I also illustrate a real places and newsworthy events. In these illustrations the reader has a reasonable expectation that I will depict the scene accurately. Yet I think we illustrators can appreciate van Gogh's belief in this subjective reality. Perhaps newspaper illustrators are expected to do interpretive realities. Can there be truth in a drawing?

Here is a painting of the Church at Auvers by van Gogh and a present day photo of the same. The artist filtered what he saw and skewed the perspective, color and mood in order to invite the viewer to experience or feel the church. Here also are two sketchbook style drawings I did for the San Francisco Chronicle on the holiday excitement in downtown San Francisco. I visited the Ferry building Farmers Market and the Powell Street Bart Station. I took photos for reference. I wanted to give the viewer a sense of the Christmas critical mass. I composed and compressed elements and figures to emphasize the feeling of shopping mania. I took liberties. To me it's an accurate depiction of the reality of these locales.

Does this kind of illustration fit in the world of journalism?

Comments, etc. to Bill@Billustration.com

You can also see the archive of Bill's past columns.