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The Power and the Image
Oscar Zarate tells the Icon Review about the relationship between words and pictures
Here are the opening lines of Alice in Wonderland: "Alice was beginning to
get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?' Quite so, Alice, welcome to the wonderful world of the Introducing series, every one packed with pictures and conversations.
When adults read Alice in Wonderland to children they probably smile
indulgently at Alice's little foible, complacent in the adult knowledge
that the need for pictures in books other than those designed for coffee
tables is something we grow out of, something intrinsically lodged in
childhood. Books with pictures are children's books or their vulgar younger
cousins - comics.
Perhaps there are Introducing readers who don't realise they are implicitly
agreeing with Alice as they immerse themselves in Quantum or Freud. Perhaps
they objectify their unwitting complicity by telling themselves these are
illustrated texts, so that's OK. That's not what artist Oscar Zarate
thinks. He says neither picture nor text comes first. It's a symbiotic
process, neither has precedence over the other, although one has a sneaking
suspicion Zarate has more time for images than words. "The writer always
has to come back to the subject. The writer can't make fiction but the
artist can.".
Before starting work on an Introducing guide, Zarate has meetings with the
writer and editor, and ideas emerge. "After the meetings I go home," says
Zarate, "and try to make sense of all these voices, attempting to devise a
visual texture for the particular subject, something which is unique to his
title and which creates a visual way of understanding the complexity of the
text. It's like a piece of music, the pictures counterpointing the text.
It's the intense concentration of all these elements, all these voices in
one page, that attracts me."
Most importantly, Zarate does not see himself as an illustrator of texts.
"I want to make a visual statement. I'm not an illustrator of texts. I
don't feel I'm illustrating a text or book, for me it is dead if it's just
the application of a craft onto a text." It's a funny thing that somehow an
artist seems to carry less intellectual weight than a writer. For example,
on collaborative work - even Introducing - the writer's name comes first.
"I'm not complaining," says Zarate, "but for me this is puzzling!"
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