Ways of Seeing

In April I got an e-mail from Julien Posture, who introduced himself as a PhD student, to ask about illustration, style, and the creative industry. After a lively conversation, I looked up his work and found that, in addition to writing about creativity, he was a wonderful illustrator, so I asked him to draw the cover for our Fall Books issue. His busy, hand-lettered, jigsawesque cover, rendered in Neapolitan ice cream colors, was a delight to work on; he took changes and revisions from the editors with humor and professionalism, and the end result was original, beautiful, and strange.

Originally from France, Posture now splits his time between Montreal and the UK, where he studies social anthropology at the University of Cambridge. His illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, and The Guardian, among many other publications. His newsletter “On Looking” collects his writing on visual culture.

Last week, I e-mailed Posture to ask him about his creative philosophy and his style.

Leanne Shapton: When you first wrote you said you were doing research for your PhD. Can you describe that work a little more? 

Julien Posture: I’m interested in how different people (and machines) can look together and against each other. My goal is to understand how looking is a consequential social activity that we do collectively, rather than a mere receptive sense that happens in our brains.

Specifically, I came to New York to study how illustrators, art directors, editors, designers, and AI models all look at the same images and styles but might not see the same thing, and to investigate how these ways of seeing interact and compete in shaping our visual culture. 

The big questions I’m excited about are: How do some ways of seeing become hegemonic? How is looking tied to economic value or political power? How are nonhuman ways of seeing (for example, how a computer sees) changing our own?

Your interest in looking makes me think of the turn-of-the-century German art historian Aby Warburg, one of my heroes. What do you think of his ideas about image transmission?

I’ve loved Aby Warburg’s work since I learned about it in art school more than a decade ago. The connections he drew among images, eras, and cultures are very inspiring and relevant to my work as an artist. As an anthropologist, I was taught to curb that enthusiasm, to be cautious about inferring meaning from superficial similarities between images or objects that are otherwise culturally far apart. 

I complement my love of Warburg with Charles Sanders Peirce’s writing about semiotics, which had a significant impact on the field of anthropology. Peirce’s proposed triad of types of signs—the symbol, the index, and the icon—is helpful for thinking about what makes us see similarities between images in the first place and how we learn to surmise a deeper connection based on those similarities. 

Either way, I find Peirce and Warburg to be such fun thinkers because they populate the world with layers and layers of hidden signs, lost connections, and emerging meanings. And that’s an exciting world to live in.

What conclusions, if any, have you made about the state of illustration, art direction, and the creative industry?

I’m still in the thick of it, and it’s hard to see the bigger picture yet. 

My work has focused on the concept of style as both a fragment of an artist’s personhood and a highly valuable commodity in our economy. Following the practices and discourses around style from artists’ studios to clients’ offices, from AI labs to intellectual property lawsuits, I think today’s debates about AI, authorship, plagiarism, etc., are really debates about people becoming things and things becoming people. 

The creative industry is the stage where these transformations take place. And illustrators, who have always straddled the divide between art and commerce, persons and things, can teach us a lot about our current moment. 

I loved discussing style with you—how would you describe your own drawing style?

Since I study style as a social object, I’m careful when talking about “my style.” I like to think that styles come and go through people and time, like viruses and bacteria; we’re just vessels for them. My PhD program (specifically the scholarship that pays for it) has removed the pressure to make a living from my work, which means my style no longer needs to be cohesive and legible for clients. I get to explore, experiment, and find new visual interests or resurface old ones. 

That being said, my work always follows one rule: make images that remind the viewer they are images. I think of it as the equivalent of breaking the fourth wall in cinema. I want my characters to be aware of their graphic materiality, my environments to stop at the frame’s border, and I like to rely on how things look to convey what I want to say. I think of making images as setting a stage rather than depicting a story.

Where did you learn to draw?

I’ve always drawn since I was a kid. An important figure when I was in my teens was a friend’s mom, who was a painter. She painted trompe-l’oeil murals, and she taught me so much. She would always pester me to draw what I’m seeing, not what I think I’m seeing, to remain as close as possible to the stimuli on my retina before they reached my occipital lobe. In hindsight, that may have inspired my interest in how we learn to see. 

I did go to art school to get a BFA in printmaking, but at that point I wasn’t interested in illustration and focused instead on artists’ books and conceptual work. It took me another BA and an MSc in anthropology—far from art—to eventually start drawing again and become an illustrator. 

You once said to me that you thought what we are doing at the Review is different from other publications. How so?

I think there are different expectations about the relationship between text and images at the Review. It seems less literal and more open-ended. Words and pictures do very different things very differently, and when we respect these semiotic differences, they work beautifully together. 

I’ve also loved how you bring painters and sculptors to the pages but without disdain for illustration. Different publications have tried to do that, but it always feels like they lower the bar for fine artists to be on the cover and raise it impossibly high for illustrators to do the same. I appreciate your care for thoughtful images, regardless of their label.

What did you grow up looking at and reading?

I grew up in a working-class family in the south of France. There weren’t many books at home, and we didn’t have the Internet. I’m indebted to a few outside figures, like my friend’s mother, who cared enough to introduce me to a different world. As a child, I remember reading picture books by Tomi Ungerer, Claude Ponti, and Grégoire Solotareff at the school library. One teacher in middle school started an informal film society and took us to see old movies and made us talk about them afterward, which was entirely new for me. The village librarian, my savior in many ways, introduced me to J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, Amin Maalouf, and Daniel Pennac, whose novels carried me through high school. 

Do you follow children’s books now? My daughter is named after Tomi Ungerer, who didn’t shy from depicting fearful images and situations in his children’s books. But lately I’ve noticed a trend of didacticism in kids’ books, an avoidance of fearful elements in favor of comforting things. Have you noticed something similar? Do you have any notions about how kids see and how that forms their psyches?

I will always be perplexed by how the US deals with violence and its representations. There is a strange relationship between what is shown and what is known here. And this tension is manifest in picture books because they concern two of Americans’ favorite topics: children and images. And so we displace the taboo of violence from society to images; children are not allowed to see an ogre eat a child in a picture book, yet they must go through a metal detector to go to school. 

Picture books are also crucial to the development of visual literacy and other skills that help to navigate our image-saturated world, to engage critically with images every day, and to reflect on how they make us feel. One of my favorite books about illustration is Dear Genius, a collection of letters from Ursula Nordstrom, the director of Harper’s picture books imprint who published, among other luminaries, Ungerer, Maurice Sendak, and Shel Silverstein. She created a space for weird, scary, sad stuff to be published. Considering where the US’s relationship with books and images is headed, I can only hope we have picture book editors around who are as fierce as she was.

What are you reading these days?

These days I’m a terribly unadventurous reader. My brain is wired to care about one thing, my research, so I end up mostly reading ethnographies and nonfiction. 

I just finished Seeing Like a Rover by Janet Vertesi, in which she follows the team of scientists who operate the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars and attempts to understand how image-making is entangled in the scientific process. The most moving books I’ve read in the past year were Life Beside Itself, by Lisa Stevenson, which compares the tuberculosis epidemic of the 1950s to the current suicide epidemic in Inuit communities, and The Land of Open Graves, by Jason De León, about the migrant trail in the Sonoran Desert that straddles Mexico and the US. 

I do always find time to read whatever Alexander Chee and Bryan Washington may write. Their work, in different ways, always feels like home.  

What do you think of the statement Milton Glaser etched above our office doorway, “Art is Work”?

Yes! I would double down and say, “Art is Labor.” I’m generally uninterested in narratives that aim to remove art from other spheres of life, to purify it from work, from commerce, or to parse what is art from what is not. The sociologist Howard Becker wrote that the term “art” is not descriptive; it’s an honorific term. I think that’s an important thing to remember.