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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Today's talk is part of our new TED Fellows Films, adapted for podcasts just for our TED Talks Daily listeners.
This is part of a special series of episodes we release throughout the year showcasing the incredible stories behind the TED Fellows program, which supports a network of global innovators. Today, we want you to meet illustrator and reportage artist George Butler.
George reports on the ground from conflict zones, climate hotspots, and humanitarian crises using pen, ink, and watercolor to highlight personal stories of perseverance.
He shares how by traveling to the edges of conflict and disaster, he captures and shares human stories that are often overlooked, and how by slowing down and being present with someone in the midst of crisis, he's able to go deeper than the headlines. After we hear from George, stick around for his conversation with TED Fellows program director Lily James Olds.
Drawing has become one of the few moments in my life that I get to be present with somebody. It's a chance to be with them and connect, which I think is very rare in this world. My name's George Butler. I'm a reportage artist, and that means going to different parts of the world, drawing humanitarian crisis, conflict zones, natural disasters, and recording the stories that I find there.
I spend a lot of time drawing in places that are typically very loud. busy scenes around the edges of atrocity, and I'm just sitting and drawing, focusing on someone's eyebrows or their face or the way that their eye catches the light.
Someone's telling you this sort of heartbreaking story, and you're trying to record or relate something that you've seen in their face onto a page to best describe it. That's my role, to inform and offer dignity and understanding and connect one side of the world with the other.
We live in such a technologically advanced age where we're supposed to be more interconnected than ever, and yet we have a far shallower understanding of other people that share our planet. I drew a man in Syria recently. He'd spent some time in Sednaya prison, which is a kind of notoriously bad place.
And as he talked through his story, I suddenly realized that all the things, the marks and the missing teeth and the loose hair and these like gaunt eyes were all from different moments of this story. And it sort of played itself out in front of me as I drew him and his mom sitting next to him. It kind of builds this picture of who they were.
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Chapter 2: What is George Butler's background and how did he become a reportage artist?
Drawing allows me the time to find something else that is, in fact, far more human. Olga I met in Kyiv. She's 99 years old and I found her in bed and she was very confused about why we were there. She thought that Putin was Hitler. She thought that maybe I was there to take her away from her home.
And in this moment of sort of clarity, she looked up and said, if you tell them all to be quiet, I'll tell them the story from the beginning. And we did. Obviously, we were quiet immediately. And she said, I was born in 1923 in the USSR. I survived the Holodomor, which was the Great Famine, killed four million Ukrainians. She went to a collective farm with her father.
War came, she was taken as a German slave to Nazi Dresden where she worked for this one particular family. They fed her worms, she escaped with her friend, the police caught her and took her home and she survived the shelling of Dresden. And at the end of the war, not knowing what she should do as a 20-year-old woman, she began to walk back to Ukraine with a herd of cows.
She met her husband, had four children, lived another 80 years. And I met her, age 99, a couple of months, in fact, before she died. It was such a personal and arresting moment. Drawing made it possible in that I had time to sit and listen. You get a little window into somebody's life and emotions and situation that I would never otherwise have. And that's impossible, I think, to forget.
Up next, a special conversation between George and TED Fellows program director Lily James Olds, where they discuss how his approach is shifting how we think about the news and why he's so grateful for what his medium allows him to do, to operate slowly, build relationships, and reflect on details that other reporting may miss out on.
That's coming up right after a short break.
Welcome, George. I am so happy that I get to talk to you today.
Thank you for having me. Nice to talk to you.
Okay, I'd love to just start by asking you, how did you get into this work? I mean, before meeting you, I had never met a reportage illustrator. And so I'm curious to hear how your path led to where you are now.
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Chapter 3: How does drawing in conflict zones help capture human stories?
And so there's great power and engagement in that. I think that the drawing comes with an author. It comes with a point of view. It's an interpretation, a composite of the scene. And I think photography and film to an extent has become...
we've become fatigued for all those reasons that we we know and now are trying to address it's human isn't it and i think in the age of generative ai i think that's something that we're gonna really want to stick with yeah i mean you know attention has become more and more at a premium these days more than ever and i guess i'm curious when you arrive in a place how do you think about where to put that attention can you tell us a little bit about your process in that way
Yes, I can pretend there's some great process to the madness. The genius of the word. In Ukraine, when I went in 2022, just after the full-scale invasion, I take a big pad of paper and a dip pen and ink and... There's two elements to it. One is that you're only really good as the local fixers and translators that you're working with. They know their country better than you'll ever know it.
They speak the language better than you. And I have to convince them that drawing is a gentle and informative, engaging way to tell stories. So they're the first sort of tool to getting in under the skin. The second is time, spending as much time as possible. And one example, I suppose, is I...
was drawing an exploded bus on the streets of Kyiv and I met these two ladies, Valentina and her friend. They were volunteering and they saw that I was drawing and they said, you must come and meet Madame Olga. She's 99 years old. Give me your phone number. We will ask her permission. And if she says yes, you can come and draw her in a few days time.
So these drawings, these portraits became a way of interviewing really. And that was my method, sort of being open and honest and trying to give dignity in return for stories.
That's interesting because I've heard you speak about this a little bit before of, you know, using the drawing as a sort of in to the interview or to get people to open up in a different kind of way or, I guess, get comfortable in a different kind of way. What do you think that...
approach allows that maybe, you know, more sort of traditional sitting down to, you know, write down someone's story or to film them on video or audio? What do you think happens in that process when you're drawing that is a bit different than the way sort of, let's just say, kind of usual journalism would work?
Hmm.
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Chapter 4: What unique experiences does George Butler share from his time in Ukraine?
Each story that was told to me was delivered with such care. for me, but also for others in their countries that they were trying to represent or not upset or balance between the politics and the family life. And so this is a very long-winded answer, but it sort of feels very moving to try and say it out loud. I think that
It comes with great relief to know that the drawings will eventually be published. And so when I get a pitch accepted by a newspaper or magazine or a TV station, then I know that I've held up my end of the promise, this sort of informal agreement, which is, if you sit and tell me your story, I will do my best to say it out loud to somebody else.
And that feels like that's the unwritten rule, and it's not always possible. But it feels like I'm doing my job properly.
Do you stay in touch with any of the people? I'm sure it depends on the person and the story and situation. But are there many people that you're still in touch with who you've captured their stories in the past?
Yep. Yeah, yeah. Lots. I mean, yeah, so many. I'm often in touch with a man called Vladimir. He was my age. His parents had lived near Chernobyl. So he later developed cancer when he was about 30. He could have left Ukraine because of that disability. So he described it. But he decided to stay and fight. And I met him in the east of the country. And we
I think because he was a self-described proud football fan and I just felt that could have so easily been me. And I stayed in touch with a young lad who's nine now. He'd been shot in the head in an accident, a friendly fire incident that killed his mother, Daria. And again, his father was my age, Stanislav, and we sat in the hospital and chatted in English. And these are the beginnings of...
I hesitate to say friendship because they're almost professional, journalistic, and yet so much meaning, so much honesty is transferred. And one more, because he's the most amazing man, a man called Sergei, who I drew in a hospital ward in Kharkiv. And when I asked Sergei if I could draw him, he grinned and he said, yes, but I'm also going to draw you.
And we sat opposite each other, drawing each other for about an hour. And he sends me these emails apologizing for swearing and then swearing about how much he hates Russia. And the most recent email was about a month ago saying, please, George, you'll have to come back to Ukraine because I've started to paint a portrait of you. And the only way you'll get it is if you come and collect it.
So I feel forever kind of attached to the individuals by this scratchy, inky, handmade line. And I suppose the knock-on effect of that is just daily or weekly to wonder where they are or how they are and whether they're okay.
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