From: bookmarch_at_aol.com
Date: Fri, 08 Oct 2010 08:43:58 -0400 (EDT)

I recently served on a dissertation committe for a doctoral student who is studying nonfiction graphic novels. We talked about the question of origina l art and nonfiction. My sense is that the art in illustrated books can cer tainly be nonfiction -- after all a photographer makes aesthetic and ideolo gical choices just as much as an illustrator does. Scholars have shown that , for example, the famous Matthew Brady Civil War photos were carefully arr anged by him. So the fact that art is photographic does not make it "pure," or "accurate," just as the fact that an artist creates illustrations today about people and events s/he did not see does not make that art "fiction." But -- just as in folktales, where we all now ask for a note on sources, a nd to know where the author got the story, and how, and how it was changed, we can ask an artist to explain in a note how s/he came up with those illu strations -- what decision were made and why. This does not need to be a lo ng essay, but it is simply a way for us to know where research ends and inv ention begins and why.

Marc Aronson (and also happy to continue this offline if it is too skew to the main thread)
Received on Fri 08 Oct 2010 08:43:58 AM CDT