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.