"When you draw, you're looking at the world anew," says artist Molly Crabapple. Speaking at The Conference in Malmo, which Wired.couk is attending, she explains to the audience why there is still a place for drawing pictures to report on things that are going on in a world that is flooded with images from the internet.

Crabapple spent most of her twenties sitting on the steps of nightclubs drawing the performers she wanted to be friends with. "Every night I would stay up until dawn," she says. "It the most amazing training for what would come later."

When Occupy Wall Street happened almost right outside her window, she could see that the narrative the media was pushing about the protestors wasn't true, so she started drawing them. Since then she has gone on to draw countless protests, riots, prisons and refugee camps. "With every drawing I try to capture individuality," she says.

There was one place where this was particularly tough, however. "Guantanamo Bay is the most American place in the world, which is why it's so shameful for me," says Crabapple. It is also, she adds, "one of the most censored places on earth".

When photographers go there, they are given are very strict briefing about exactly what they are allowed to take photos of. At the end of the day, press officers will look through their cameras and delete anything they don't like. When Crabapple was there, to report for Vice, however, she believes she had an advantage. She wasn't allowed to draw the guards faces -- and replaced them instead with dead-eyed masks. She also wasn't allowed to draw the faces of the prisoners -- when she left, the press officers made sure she had scribbled them out. She did, however, have her memory.


She took her memories and publicly available information and drew pictures that she hoped would "crystallise the divide" between the horrors and force feeding occurring inside the camp and the Americana outside of its gates. A lawyer who represented some of the Guantanamo prisoners sent her pictures of their faces so she could draw them properly. "Unlike photography, drawing is something no one can take from you," says Crabapple. "I drew so they could not be erased."

Crabapple has found that not only has drawing help her win friends and influence people, but has also equipped with her the ability to watch others in a way that society might not expect. "Women are looked at, but art gave me the permission to look back," she says. "Where the respectable avert their gaze, artists stare… we go into courtrooms where no cameras are allowed."

There was no camera in the courtroom when Chelsea Manning was tried. But Crabapple was there and what she observed was "just this small person surrounded by the impediments of the state. [...] The state did everything they could to say this is not important."

"We live in a time when there are more images than any other time in history," says Crabapple. We are living in a Panopticon, where for the first time "the state is watching us, but we're watching the state as well -- we're watching each other." When an event is in the news now, Twitter becomes "one giant eyeball" and "the images swirl past so fast you can never get to the bottom of your Twitter stream. These photos and these words prove that no-one is voiceless."

Still, Crabapple asked herself why she should contribute to this glut of images. The answer lies within what is happening in Ferguson, Missouri right now, which she describes as "the most important thing that has happened in America for a long time".

When police murdered a black man and people held a candlelight vigil, they then came back with dogs and rubber bullets. They teargassed teenagers and arrested journalists. In the past this might have only been reported in the African-American news with the mainstream press reporting from the cops' perspective, points out Crabapple, but thanks to Twitter, everyone knew the truth. "Suddenly the old narrative -- just people rioting -- looked exactly like what it was, which was a racist lie."


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