The Comics Bureau

Matt Brady, over at War­ren Peace writes up a couple of knock-down art­icles on Didier Lefevre & Emmanuel Guibert’s The Pho­to­grapher. The first is a par­tic­u­larly insight­ful review;

While this is Lefevre’s story, told dir­ectly from his per­spect­ive and mak­ing heavy use of his memor­ies and accom­pan­ied by hun­dreds of the pho­to­graphs that he took, French car­toon­ist Emmanuel Guibert is the one that really brings it to life in com­ics form, cap­tur­ing the like­nesses of every­one Lefevre encountered and mak­ing the land­scapes and vil­lages seem like real, lived-in loc­ales. The pho­tos are inter­spersed through­out the pages, such that they often seem like com­ics pan­els among the rest of the illus­tra­tions, but Guibert fills everything out, mak­ing the char­ac­ters seem to move and live in the way that static pho­to­graphy can’t. But he does this without being showy, stick­ing to muted col­ors and subtle fig­ure work. It’s only when you look closer that you real­ize the great work he does, cap­tur­ing real­istic ges­tures, move­ments, and facial expres­sions, and put­ting just the right amount of detail into the folds of cloth­ing and the objects in the back­grounds, such that the art­work doesn’t stand out from the pho­tos, but also emphas­izes the way they can more fully cap­ture real­ity. It’s all per­fectly paced and put together for the best flow, pro­pelling the eye across the page without call­ing atten­tion to itself.

The second is a short ana­lysis of one sequence from the book;

This is actu­ally nearly four pages of com­ics, with two pan­els per tier, but I sep­ar­ated them and laid them out hori­zont­ally to demon­strate the way Guibert makes the whole thing work as one long walk through a detailed land­scape. It’s pretty gor­geous, like one of those scenes in a Woody Allen movie in which two char­ac­ters have a con­ver­sa­tion while walk­ing down a Man­hat­tan side­walk and the cam­era just fol­lows them, never look­ing away. But what struck me was how well the chan­ging land­scape matches the mood of the scene; at the begin­ning, when the con­ver­sa­tion between Didier Lefevre, the pho­to­grapher of the title, and Juli­ette, the leader of the human­it­arian mis­sion to Afgh­anistan, is lim­ited to a fairly benign sub­ject, they are cross­ing smooth ground:

This of course goes without say­ing, but if you don’t already own a copy, sweep your com­puter from the desk and run out without a coat or shoes to get a copy of this book. I’m sure I’m not alone in stat­ing that this isn’t just a comic book. This is a mas­ter­class in the sub­tleties of visual storytelling.