Rarely do image editors get the chance to start from scratch. But this was the opportunity at the start of The Correspondent. We were given these five amazing writers and their beats to match with visual counterparts and were able to set guidelines that we could formulate ourselves! As Lise, your image editor for the greatest part of this journey, is on maternity leave, I (Yara) will take you back to our very first weeks of launching The Correspondent.
One guideline was clear from the start: we didn't want to illustrate what was written, but rather try to provide additional perspectives.
So nine days away from launch day, we found ourselves looking at hundreds of portfolios and ‘turbo-searching’ (AKA googling like you never did before) for existing projects or unknown artists who could bring their own and unique perspectives. It felt like a small, underground operation, digging for visual gems.
Image editing for The Correspondent made us into creative cupids, trying to match the right artist to a story and its author. So as we wrap up, let me go back to some of the pieces where the visual narrative gave us, and hopefully you too, the opportunity to look at the story from a different angle.
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FIRST 1,000 DAYS
JENGMEE YOON
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Left: Thomas and His Blue Things, New York, US, 2015. Right: Jiwon and Her Pink Things, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea, 2008.
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The photographic work we showed with Irene Caselli's story on raising a gender-free child, functions almost like an infographic. Seoul-based artist JeongMee Yoon started photographing children and their belongings after discovering how ubiquitous her own daughter’s love for pink was.
Every image takes about four to eight hours to create, as she carefully displays their possessions out in their rooms. Shot both in Korea and the US, the project shows how cultural paradigms can exist in radically different places. For the series, which is still ongoing, she revisited and rephotographed the children several times, showing their changing tastes and surroundings.
From boys to feminists: raising a gender-free child
Essay: 7 – 9 minutes
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The very first piece by OluTimehin Adegbeye was accompanied by the project ‘Humanae’ by Madrid based Brazilian visual artist Angelíca Dass. Humanae seeks to demonstrate that what defines human beings is their inescapable uniqueness and consequently their diversity.
The background for each portrait is tinted with a pantone color identical to a sample of 11 x 11 pixels taken from the nose of the subject. Dass photographed over 4,000 people resulting in an amazing body of work that underlines the fact that race is a social construct rather than a biological one.
The stick figure on the door: unconscious ways we exclude each other
Essay: 7 – 9 minutes
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BETTER POLITICS
SJOERD VAN LEEUWEN
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Up until the publication of this story by Nesrine Malik, all the infographics had been made by the amazing Afonso Gonsalves (editorial designer for The Correspondent) or one of the designers at De Correspondent. The collaboration with Dutch illustrator Sjoerd van Leeuwen was an experiment to search for an alternative way of showing a timeline as well as showing very vertical images in a text.
Brexit happened by a thousand cuts. The challenge now is to build back trust
Analysis: 5 – 6 minutes
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To kick off Eric Holthaus’s pieces on the climate emergency, we chose to stay away from the visual representation you will find when entering these terms into your search engine. ‘Ways To Tie Trees’ by Singapore visual artist Woong Soak Teng is a typology of different permutations of tree staking in Singapore.
In the context of Eric’s words, these intimate portraits underline a definite paradox: the urge to control our environment side by side with the personal, helpful touch of inventive tree-tying techniques. But you could also read the same photographs as a metaphor for what is needed to deal with the climate crisis: human intervention, invention, and action.
Climate change is about how we treat each other
Essay: 6 – 7 minutes
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SANITY
IBRAHIM RAYANTAKATH
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For Sanity, we knew we wanted to collaborate with an illustrator who had a shared lived experience with Tanmoy Goswami. Little did we know that stumbling upon the Tumblr page of Indian-based illustrator Ibrahim Rayintakath during one of our turbo-search-session, would be the start of a collaboration until the day of this writing.
In Ibrahim's own words:
‘The articles and problems Tanmoy tried to address were identical questions and concerns for a whole bunch of us during that period of time in the country. I had illustrated a past event of myself along with my therapist and the room I used to attend it in. Similarly the 'protests as a therapy'. It was mostly like making connections from a personal journal and finding a whole new purpose for them.’
‘How’s your mind?’ The quest for new ways to talk about mental illness
Essay: 8 – 11 minutes
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By the way, Ibrahim wrote to tell us that he quit his full-time job last week to make it as an illustrator.
That’s also the magic of the work that we do: as our chapter is ending, we see new ones begin.
Your image editors,
Yara van der Velden & Lise Straatsma
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