VISUAL JOURNALISM: The Artist as Reporter - Part 5

By guest author, Daniel Zalkus

In the middle to late 60’s Frank Zachary, the art director of Holiday Magazine often sent artists out to report. The topics ranged from the growth of postwar industrial Europe to the current happenings on Wall Street and to an article about a specific city.

Artist Don Kingman went to San Francisco for an article titled “Even the air is different in San Francisco” and produced a beautiful two page spread showing the landscape of the city through ink drawing.




Another artist, this time the famed English illustrator Ronald Searle, was a regular contributor to Holiday.



Searle said: “In the ‘fifties, Punch was very keen on artists getting out and about. All my early New York features were made for it. In the ‘sixties and ‘seventies the initiative came from America. I worked for Holiday Magazine for about fifteen years, regularly covering America and Canada, occasionally, Europe. In some cases I was allotted fifteen to twenty pages a feature, in full colour – and often had to provide the text. Punch died and so did Holiday and Life Magazine and the reportage field became virtually non-existent!”**



Holiday Magazine sent Searle west to record the sights and sounds of Las Vegas for a feature.



Is reportage “non-existent” today as Searle points out? It may not be a regular feature in magazines but occasionally work will crop up harkening back to this Golden Era.



The practice seems to have evolved and continues with websites such as www.urbansketchers.org and the Masters Program at the School of Visual Arts (“Illustration as Visual Essay”). In the Masters Program many of the drawing philosophies of Robert Weaver are kept alive and continue to this day. Artists are encouraged to draw “what they know” and create a series, often intermixed with on-the-spot drawing.

Visual journalism has a great deal of merit. As words can communicate an author’s thoughts and feelings, an artist’s line can do the same, often in a more visceral and concise manner. Reportage is another tool, another option that is underutilized today.



Legendary art directors such Lionni, Gangel and Zahary viewed illustration in broad terms. Artists not only provided imagery for a story; they told the story with their images, with their viewpoint, filtered through first hand experience. By all accounts, attention spans today are shorter than ever; illustrative reportage has a unique ability to communicate the facts through a viewpoint that is both concise and universal (language is no barrier!).

Utilized correctly, reportage could be more than a novelty harkening back to an earlier day. It could be a driver of dialogue in the future.

* My thanks to Daniel Zalkus for all his hard work putting together this fascinating, inspiring series for Today's Inspiration. Daniel is an illustrator with a passion for on-the-spot drawing. You can see some of Daniel's own excellent work at his website. Many thanks again, Daniel! ~ Leif

**Quote taken from “Line No.1” a journal published by the Department of Art and Design Pathway. APU, Cambridge.

VISUAL JOURNALISM: The Artist as Reporter - Part 4

By guest author, Daniel Zalkus

CBS television, under the art direction of Bill Golden, assigned many on-the-spot jobs. One such assignment was the CBS calendar, which was illustrated by a different artist each year.



Artists were sent to the television studio to capture, through drawing, the behind the scenes activity. The drawings generated were printed without studio tweaking or editorial modification.

In 1958 the famed fashion illustrator, Carl Erickson (“Eric”), was assigned the job.



Utilizing a variety of tools, from ink to wash to pencil, he drew the actors, television men, producers, costume designers, etc., whose daily routines were the typical scene of that time.










“The Blue Convention” is another CBS project from that era.



Artist Felix Tolpolski was sent to report about both the Democratic and Republican national conventions of 1956, work that was later printed as a book.



From the inside front cover:

“Felix Topolski is one of the very few artists who can draw at top speed with 12,000 people milling about him. And because he is a Polish-born Londoner who has drawn his way through four continents in war and peace he can draw the American Scene in an election year with political neutrality. Since these were unique qualifications for such an assignment, CBS Television invited him to attend both national conventions where he recorded these free and spontaneous reactions to a uniquely American political institution.”












Visual journalism had reached its height.

Concluded tomorrow.

* Daniel Zalkus is an illustrator with a passion for on-the-spot drawing. You can see some of Daniel's own excellent work at his website.

VISUAL JOURNALISM: The Artist as Reporter - Part 3

By guest author, Daniel Zalkus

Richard Gangel, the art director of Sports Illustrated from 1960-1981, encouraged reportage drawing. He sent artists all over the world to cover topics such as golf, spring training in Florida, and football.

Gangel sent Bob Peak on an assignment to travel with the Shah of Iran during a tiger hunt.



Peak said it was his most exotic assignment as well as his most rewarding: “To do pictures for this assignment I spent seventeen days on horseback (the grandstand at the racetrack was my only previous relationship with horses)..."



"... lived in the Shah’s hunting palace..."



"... had eight-course meals at dusk in tents with Persian rugs."



"It was an unbelievable experience – exhausting physically, but an emotional skyrocket. I did some sketches on location, but one doesn’t sketch well on top of an Arabian Steed, so I took a couple of thousand photographs. The days and evenings kept me so busy that I didn’t have the pictures processed until my return to New York."



"There a case of dysentery, picked up by drinking from a sparkling, apparently harmless stream in Iran, put me in the hospital."

"Ninety percent of the drawings were done on butcher’s paper with watercolor and crayon while I was flat on my back. The finished art in this case is hardly discernible from the on-the-spot sketches."



"Although I worked largely from photographs, I could never have understood the fantastic color and uniqueness of this subject without having experienced it myself. Reportage of this kind is one of the most valid functions of the illustrator.”

*Bob Peak quote from the 1967 Famous Artists Course Book

Austin Briggs traveled to Idaho to follow a group of elk hunters for this series in 1962.



The feature was printed as a portfolio with the text consisting of Briggs talking about his experience on the trip.









Continued tomorrow.

* Daniel Zalkus is an illustrator with a passion for on-the-spot drawing. You can see some of Daniel's own excellent work at his website.

* The Bob Peak scans in today's post are courtesy David Apatoff

VISUAL JOURNALISM: The Artist as Reporter - Part 2

By guest author, Daniel Zalkus

Illustration buyers (primarily magazines and newspapers) came to understand the value of direct drawing and importance of “being there”. While an artist can work from a photo, or their imagination, it’s the sights, sounds, smell, and environment that help give an on-the-spot drawing a uniqueness all its own.



Illustrators became “visual journalists” to cover various topics around the world.



One art director, Leo Lionni became a driving force behind the “visual journalism” movement. He worked for Fortune Magazine from 1948-1960 and not only hired illustrators but also fine art painters. He encouraged artists “to do the things they weren’t accustomed too.” Illustrators were sent on assignments all over the globe to draw upon and interpret firsthand experiences.

Robert Weaver, a pioneer illustrator in the visual journalism movement, said: “Lionni trusted the artist, and once he picked the right practitioner, he left him alone.”



For the January 1960 issue of Fortune Magazine, Weaver was sent to Woolworth to illustrate an article titled “What´s Come Over Old Woolworth?”



Weaver starts with a drawing of a stock boy and works his way up the corporate ladder.



As he does this, the chairs and tables increase in size...







... to show the level of importance the men at the top were at that time.



Weaver described the process, “The drawings were rendered from life. I asked the stock boy just to stand for a few minutes...



... and finally, I rendered the big-time lawyers. As for process, essentially there is not a hell of a lot of transformations between the sketches and the finishes. I’ve simplified the finish a little bit and added some color.”



“I’ve actually made the pictures more decorative. My sketches are notes, and the color variations stay in the mind. I make the drawings without colors, and later I simply bathe the picture in what I remember to be proper light.”



John Russell Clift, also for Lionni at Fortune, was assigned an article titled “Big Dogs, Little Dogs and the Air Cargo Bone”. As mentioned in the magazine pages: “Artist John Clift painted these pictures in the middle of the night, under the floodlights of O’Hare Airport. Nighttime is freight loading time at most airports.”





Also of note is that the credits don’t list them as illustrations. Instead they read “Silk-screen prints by John Russell Clift”.



Weaver added: “That was Fortune’s policy, to send artists on stories. I was sent to Ohio and Alabama, just all over. Sports Illustrated later did the same thing.”



Reportage was a widely accepted artform.

Continued tomorrow.

* Daniel Zalkus is an illustrator with a passion for on-the-spot drawing. You can see some of Daniel's own excellent work at his website.