Abstract
In this image-driven age it has always been a matter of regret that there seems to be so little dedicated visual reportage in our public prints. Why are there not more photo essays? Why do different newspapers always choose the same pictures? What happened to Life? Where did Picture Post go? Why has The Guardian stopped printing its own photographers' bylines? Where, oh where is the drawn reportage that in the past was so magnificently exemplified by the likes of Ronald Searle and Paul Hogarth?
It's far too easy to say that television removed the need for it, since the quality of visual journalism, particularly on TV news, is so much less interesting, less challenging and certainly less coherent than ever. Too many news reports involve a moronic sequence of visual puns that build up to a person standing in front of a building, or nodding at a desk.
Joe Sacco has been single-handedly bucking this trend for many years now. In his major works, Palestine, Safe Area Gorazde and Footnotes in Gaza he has told stories that need to be told from places it's difficult to access, with sympathy, humanity and intelligence, and in the lowly medium of the comic strip. One of the main reasons it is so hard to find good visual journalism is that it is so bloody hard to do, let alone do well. A practitioner needs an ability to observe, to record, to write and to draw, but above all else needs an absolute commitment to a strong set of journalistic ethics.
Joe Sacco was born in Malta and grew up in Australia and the USA. He studied journalism in Portland, Oregon, before turning to comics. Journalism is a collection of his shorter pieces, drawn for a variety of magazines, newspapers and journals, and herein lies one of its problems: there are so few publications that are willing and prepared to give Sacco his head. Inevitably the shorter formats, to fit in with whichever organ is doing the commissioning, be it Time, The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, the Boston Globe or Guardian Weekend, merely serve to whet one's appetite for his longer work.
Thankfully there are some very substantial pieces in this collection: a brilliant study of refugees in the Caucasus, Chechen War, Chechen Women from the collection I Live Here, published to benefit Amnesty; The Unwanted, a disturbing account of illegal migrants from Africa into Malta, published by the Virginia Quarterly Review; and Kushinagar, an investigation into the Dalit landless labourers (or “untouchables”) of Uttar Pradesh published by the French magazine XXI.
Whichever subject he tackles (and there are many, including the War Crimes Court in The Hague; the Palestinian territories; being an embedded journalist in Iraq – not a happy tale, but a nonetheless rather absurd one), Sacco's approach is commendably direct with a total commitment to the truth of his subjects, whoever they may be. His style owes a great deal to the deadpan comic realist aesthetic of the great Robert Crumb yet, while he lacks the master's ease with figure drawing, he more than makes up for it by venturing far deeper and more directly into every subject he tackles, and there are no easy subjects in this book.
The fact of his sheer commitment to his chosen task commands our attention. His laborious cross-hatching and stark use of shadow and darkness get better with everything he does; his panoramic scenes are breathtaking and, most importantly, his portraits of the many, many individual people he interviews are as assured and as accurate as they could possibly be.
And here lies his advantage. The same approach attempted with photographs would be impossible because it would be so intrusive. Drawing provides a kind of distance that enables him to be thoroughly objective without either degrading or ennobling the people he draws. Nor does his work pretend to some kind of illusory balance. As he eloquently states in his introduction:
“I chiefly concern myself with those who seldom get a hearing, and don't feel it incumbent on me to balance their voices with the well-crafted apologetics of the powerful.”
More often than not he appears as a kind of gawky, bespectacled, slightly frog-like character in his own work. The way in which he constructs his work is bound to be contentious, so this is his way of tackling that question head on, while providing some light relief at the same time.
“By making it difficult to draw myself out of a scene, it hasn't permitted me to make a virtue of dispassion. For good or ill, the comics’ medium is adamant, and it has forced me to make choices. In my view, that is part of its message.”
One can only hope for a similar kind of honesty in other forms of journalism. Perhaps BBC News, with its much vaunted “Mission to Explain” (Government Policy) should take note. There is a snobbery that considers any form of visual journalism a mere adjunct to the more important written piece or think-piece in pursuit of the truth. Design, graphics and photography are swept into a side office and labelled “Creative” (as if writing were somehow not creative). The problem is that we do not think in words alone. Sometimes we think only in images and sometimes, too often, words betray no sign of thought at all.
A paper that shall remain nameless, though I know it very well, will time and again send its own, experienced photographers to cover an event or story, and then insist on using agency photographs. The desk would never even dream of treating senior written journalists so casually, yet such systematic stupidity is part of everyday life on today's modern news organ. What is so depressing is that such an attitude negates the importance of the particular, the specific and the individual point of view, while asserting the importance of the safe, the conventional and the homogenised.
Joe Sacco's work does the exact opposite, and by so doing has raised journalism to a whole new area of possibility.