By Judah Breitbach
Editors Note: Sacco is the 2019 Writer in Residence.
Once I start drawing, I basically nail myself to the desk and just draw for years.
How long does it take you to do all this?
A couple of weeks; a couple of months. Maybe four months, depending on the story, to do the travel and the research, but then it takes years and years to write and to draw the book.
So something like “The War,” a multi-panel piece of art, does that literally take years? Or is that a figure of speech? How does that compare to something like “The Fixer” where it seems like things are happening to you on the fly: in sniper alley, in the streets of Sarajevo, then in the club where you danced, are you there taking photos, or is this all from memory? What’s the difference between “The War” and “The Fixer” and what’s the process there?
Well, I knew that the night-club would be central to the story. So what I did was I went in at some point and took a bunch of photos of the place just so I could remind myself what it looked like. The process can take years to draw and you can begin to forget what a place looked like and felt like. I took a lot of pictures of the people and of course I took a lot of pictures of the surroundings — like the Holiday Inn near sniper alley. I ended up getting an apartment that overlooked the Holiday Inn. So I had really good photographs of that particular area where I was walking to the Inn in the beginning of “The Fixer.” A lot of research I could do online, like of people who I had never met, people who had died before I got there. A lot of those gang leaders ended up becoming up commissioned in the Bosnian Army at the beginning of the war. A lot of those people I just researched what they looked like. That’s sort of how I got thfe visual picture, because, you’re right, after a period of time you forget what a place looks like. Memory is important, but I try to base that in the photographs that I take. I try and take pictures of things I’m going to be drawing a lot later. If you look at my photographs, most of them are not interesting, they don’t look like a foreign correspondents pictures. Everyone there drives a Peugeot, so I would take a lot of photos of Peugeots. Water containers or solar panels on the roofs of refugee camps, I would take pictures of those. All these things for reference that will help me later on. For people’s stories, I tend to ask a lot of visual questions. I ask what things look like, maybe more than a prose writer would ask. If a prose writer says “we were taken in a truck to a school”, that may be enough for a reader.
Saccco is coming to Campus April 30-May 2.
Access Pt 2 at: https://www.passthebuc.com/2019/02/joe-sacco-interview-pt-2/