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Sketching out new narrative paths using the power of the pencil
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Architecture critic Phineas Harper, co-initiator of the recent Turncoats series of architectural debates in London (where photography is banned), reflects upon – and argues for – the continuing relevance of drawing as a critical mode of reportage.
The drawing is a wide dark rectangle tapering to a curve at one side. Within the outline, hundreds of silhouette figures are packed, rotated in places to fill the space completely. It looks like a survey of a mass grave but is something even more horrifying: the infamous plan of eighteenth-century British slave ship, the Brookes. The sharp realisation of precisely what you’re looking at is gut-wrenching. How, you wonder, could the draughtsman of this terrible image have slept at night, knowing their work was complicit in such ghastly trade? However, that very feeling of revulsion is exactly what the drawing’s creators intended – they sought not to profit from slavery but to end it.
Previous page: Drawing courtesy Refugee Republic. This page: “Stowage of the British slave ship ‘Brookes’ under the regulated slave trade act of 1788”.
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The drawing was commissioned in 1788 by a Plymouth-based group of abolitionists who, after obtaining accurate schematics of the Brookes, enlisted an engraver to make the plan. Under new regulations Brookes was legally permitted to carry 454 slaves and the abolitionists wanted to shock the public with what that looked like. (In fact the engraver could only fit in 400 figures, making the reality of slave transportation even more appalling). The group ran off 7,000 posters of the image, after which it spread rapidly, reproduced in pamphlets, newspapers and books on both sides of the Atlantic. Both harrowing and fascinating, the drawing tapped into the public and political psyche, causing widespread outcry, ultimately playing its part in abolition.
The Brookes plan was a remarkably early and successful piece of drawn propaganda but the power of drawing to effect and document political change is enduring. Indeed, in an era of Instagram-style ubiquitous “citizen journalism” the drawing, cartoon and sketch seem to be reclaiming territory from the photograph as instruments of activism.
Refugee Republic is an interactive documentary with drawing as a means of communication at its heart, initiated by artist Jan Rothuizen, multimedia journalist Martijn van Tol, photographer Dirk Jan Visser and web developer Aart Jan van der Linden. Focusing on Domiz refugee camp in Northern Iraq but resonant with similar sites the world over, it traces four routes through the dense camp, delving into the lives of the people who call Domiz “home”. Somewhere between a film, a website and an architectural survey, the project stitches together a web of stories in an attempt to change public perceptions around the reality of long-term refugeedom.
Image courtesy Refugee Republic.
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Video trailer courtesy Refugee Republic.
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In June 2015, the UN reported that worldwide displacement had hit an all-time high with 59.5 million people forced to flee their homes. The resulting camps are vast, the largest among them comparable to cities – Dadaab in Kenya for example accommodates over 400,000‚ making it larger than Zurich. Yet as we continue to think of such camps as temporary stop-gaps, worldwide refugees live in some form of relief care for an average of 17 years. What it means for an ostensibly impermanent settlement to host deaths, births, education, religion and the full spectrum of human life is the subject of many books including Manuel Herz’ Camp to City (2012, Lars Müller) but rarely is it so engagingly conveyed as in Refugee Republic.
The central use of drawing is critical – Jan Rothuizen’s sketches are overtly friendly in quality. Photography and film is used selectively to tell specific chapters but the surrounding context is all drawn, with curious details annotated as if in the pages of a journal. The effect is upbeat and while the overarching political context is distressing, the authors want their audience to engage with the documentary’s protagonists first and foremost as fellow humans with backstories and passions. Through drawing they achieve something conventional multimedia reportage fails: a sensitive, three-dimensional portrait of a complex, fraught setting, raising much-needed awareness without resorting to dumbed-down narratives.
The act of drawing can be a political statement in itself. Lucinda Rogers’ large ink drawings of London’s urban realm, for instance, often focus on the working class businesses which make up the real economy – the kind of unsexy traders that waves of gentrifying property development displace. Yet what might appear through the barrel of a camera lens to be dirty and dilapidated, Rogers reveals to be thriving in messy productivity. Architect and former head of Design for London, Mark Brearley uses drawings similarly, forensically mapping every business (registered or otherwise) in an area with door to door surveys. Both Brearley and Roger’s work celebrates marginalised communities in a way that photography struggles to.
“View over Spitalfields Looking West” by Lucinda Rogers.
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Phineas Harper is a designer, editor and critic. He is Deputy Director of the Architecture Foundation and former Deputy Editor of the Architectural Review. He is co-creator of the bombastic architectural debating society, Turncoats and author of the Magma Architecture Sketchbook (2015, Laurence King).
Some argue drawing is flawed on account of its subjectivity whereas photography is objective – Bronx-born street photographer Garry Winogrand even claimed “Photos have no narrative content. They only describe light on surface.” Yet for Bertolt Brecht writing in the 1931 Threepenny Lawsuit, photography is entirely artificial: “A photograph of the Krupp Works or the AEG reveals almost nothing about these institutions […] The reification of human relations, the factory, for example, no longer discloses those relations. So there is indeed ‘something to construct’, something ‘artificial’, ‘invented.’” Making a photograph then is just as manipulative as drawing and potentially more so because of the photographer’s invasive impact on their subject.
In recent months we have become used to seeing photographs of small boats overflowing with people trying (and all-too-often failing) to cross the Mediterranean sea. These images are terrifying and wretched yet in their ubiquity we have become numb to the suffering they capture (as Ai Weiwei’s bizarre impersonation of a drowned refugee child illustrates). The echoes of the eighteenth century slave ships are obvious but the roar of public outcry needed to secure humanitarian action seems distant. Where photography has failed to galvanise political will, could drawings, created and deployed with campinging intent, make a meaningful mark? I
Above: “Under a Mercedes”; Below:“Workshop at DW Wood Machinists”, both by Lucinda Rogers.
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