Reading Group is a recurring format where members share and discuss resources used before, during, and after teaching illustration. Do you want to prepare and share something for our next event? Please let us know at: mail@illustrationeducators.org
Texts presented
Through Witnessing: Threading the critiquing, making, teaching of design (Set Margins’, 2025) by Nida Abdullah, Chris Lee, Xinyi Li (Eds.) https://www.setmargins.press/books/throughwitnessing/
‘The transposing illustrator: Challenges and opportunities meeting the authorial illustrator that interacts, documents and bears witness of the unrepresented and the non-representable; (Journal of Illustration, Volume 10, Issue Transitus, 2023) by Hilde Kramer https://doi.org/10.1386/jill_00060_1
I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own (Chicago University Press, 2011) by Michael Taussig https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo11637787.html
Recording Britain: A Pictorial Domesday of Pre-war Britain (David & Charles, 1990) by Gill Saunders, Patrick Wright, David Mellor https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1500059633
Heimat: A German Family Album (Penguin Books, 2018) Nora Krug https://nora-krug.com/belonging-heimat
Rachel Emily Taylor and Philip Kennedy led the event. It used the recently published Through Witnessing (2025) as a starting point for a broader discussion on the role of witnessing within illustration and illustration education. The session adopted the book’s technique of threading – an approach that allows for multiple narrative strands and interpretive routes, structuring the session to weave together various points of entry and divergence. This method aimed to encourage open discussion, drawing connections across illustration practice and pedagogy.
Rachel opened the session with a short extract from the book’s introduction, in which editors Nida Abdullah, Chris Lee and Xinyi Li define witnessing:
The act of witnessing is interwoven with complicity, corroboration, and contradiction. It implies endurance through time, a demand for accountability, as well as acts of collective memorialization and support that make real something that might have otherwise remained in the shadows, forgotten and not believed. Witnessing is also a way of learning and reflecting. (Abdullah, Lee & Li, 2025, p. 4)
Rachel reflected on Hilde Kramer’s research into illustrating the unrepresentable and on the idea of documentary drawing as testimony – illustration as an act to bear witness. She also revisited Michael Taussig’s I Swear I Saw This (which she discussed in a previous reading group), in which the anthropologist writes about drawing in his fieldwork notebooks as:
“...more than the result of seeing. It is a seeing that doubts itself (...) This must be where witnessing separates itself from seeing, where witnessing becomes holy writ: mysterious, complicated, powerful. And necessary.” (Taussig, 2011, p. 2)
For Philip, the text provided a productive prompt to reflect on his own relationship with the term witnessing, particularly its relationship to other forms of 'seeing' within illustration practice and pedagogy. Terms like observing, looking, or perceiving can often be conflated, but unpacking their intent reveals important distinctions. He, too, referenced Taussig, drawing from a later point in the book:
“If I say that my drawing is an act of witness, what I mean to say is that it aspires to a certain gravity beyond the act of seeing with one’s own eyes. To witness, as opposed to see, is to be implicated in a process of judgment…” (Taussig, 2011, p. 71)
This led Philip to Claire Doran’s recent PhD study, Engaged Witnessing (2024), which examines three Holocaust education texts: Anne Frank’s Diary, Elie Wiesel’s Night, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus. In her introduction, Doran defines the core concept:
“I define engaged witnessing as addressing the gap between empathy and action and signifying the inspiration of an empathetic response that requires responsibility and can motivate action.”
With this framing in mind, Philip proposed that words like witnessing can function as bridging terms, verbs that connect inner experience with outward action; in the case of Doran, witnessing bridges the gap between empathy and responsibility, prompting an actionable response.
By extension, he explored how witnessing might be positioned in contrast to a word like gaze, which is often bound up with power. Drawing on John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1973), he recalled how the gaze (particularly the male or imperial gaze) functions to categorise, distance, or claim ownership. He also referenced Susan Sontag’s view in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), which considers how suffering, especially through photographs, does not necessarily foster understanding. The gaze, she warns, can desensitise; only witnessing, with context and intent, holds the potential to mobilise.
Building on these conceptual distinctions, Philip brought along two books to explore how terms like seeing, recording, and witnessing might operate in practice.
The first, Recording Britain, speaks more to the act of documentation than to witnessing in the ethical or accountable sense outlined earlier. The word "recording" is central here – not just in the title, but in the project's purpose. Commissioned by the British government during World War II, it employed artists to produce topographical watercolours of the British landscape at a time when a Nazi invasion felt imminent. The initiative functioned as both documentary and propaganda: an attempt to preserve a vision of Britain worth defending.
In the context of this reading group, Recording Britain prompts reflection on the politics of preservation. Does it present an idealised, even sentimental view of a nation at war? Philip proposed the book as a way to consider recording as a bridge between seeing and keeping: “I saw this, and now it is kept.” To record is to conserve, appreciate, and often to remember. But this act is never neutral. It’s bound up in values and ideologies: What gets remembered? Who decides what is worth recording? Through witnessing, by contrast, we might say: “I saw this, and now I am responsible.”
This led naturally to Nora Krug’s 2018 graphic memoir Heimat, which explores themes of identity, inherited guilt, and belonging through her lived experience as a second-generation German reckoning with her country’s Nazi past. Through a blend of personal narrative and archival research, Krug confronts the silence and ambivalence that shaped postwar German attitudes to history.
Importantly, Heimat is not simply a record of her family’s past. Krug defines her work as a form of witnessing. Her illustrations aren’t neutral artefacts; they are visual testimonies of moral inquiry. Constructed from family archives, interviews, and found ephemera, the book acknowledges its gaps, contradictions, and uncomfortable truths. It dwells in the complexities of intergenerational responsibility.
In May, Philip attended a talk by Krug at the International Literature Festival in Dublin, where she emphasised that witnessing is central to her practice. In her words: “By making history visible, we commit to it – we make it visible to others, and in doing so, we become witnesses, and we make our readers witnesses too.”
After sharing this work, Rachel and Philip introduced projects by two recent graduates. As leaders of BA Illustration courses – Rachel at Camberwell College of Arts and Philip at the National College of Art and Design – they aimed to highlight how the notion of witnessing may already be emerging within their teaching practices, and to reflect on the value of embedding it more intentionally into illustration curricula. Philip presented Tommy Myles' work, which uses blind drawing and sculpture to create abstracted memorials of buildings under threat of demolition - visual acts that both record and mourn. Rachel shared Ayshe-Mira Yashin's four-part visual essay on British Overseas Territories in Cyprus. Developed through on-site research, her sketchbooks formed the basis of refined visual translations that highlight power, place, and presence.
The presentation was followed by a lively discussion that questioned how the concept of witnessing might be explored or challenged in our roles as illustration educators. Attendees also shared a rich collection of related resources.
Books (and other resources) referred to:
Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering, The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
Claire Doran, Engaged Witnessing: An Ethical Framework for Teaching the Holocaust (PhD, 2024)
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Penguin, 1972)
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (Penguin, 2004)
Forensic Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London,
Paula Rego, Abortion Series (1998)
Nick Willing, Paula Rego, Secrets & Stories (BBC, 2017)
Daniel Torrent, One day, two weeks, three months… (Edicions Cal·lígraf, 2015)
Saidiya Hartman, Venus in Two Acts (Small Axe, 2008)
Nora Krug, Diaries of War (Penguin, 2022)
Timothy Snyder and Nora Krug, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Penguin, 2021)
Saidiya Hartman, Gallery 214: Critical Fabulations (MoMA, 2021)
Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman – Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth (Verso Books, 2021)
James Bridle, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence (Penguin, 2022)
Members who attended the event and contributed to this list of resources
Emma Dodson
Caroline Baruah
Darryl Clifton
Sara Feio
Rachel Gannon
Philip Kennedy
Jackie Sheridan
Rachel Emily Taylor