Why I spend hours sketching in conflict zones | George Butler

0:07You'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 and crises using pen, ink, and watercolor to highlight personal stories of perseverance.

0:46He 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.

1:13Drawing 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.

1:57Someone'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 Siddhnaia prison, which is a kind of notoriously bad place. And as he talked through his story, I suddenly realised that all the things, the marks and the missing teeth and the loose hair and these gaunt eyes were all from different moments of this story.

2:49And it sort of played itself out in front of me as I drew him and his mum sitting next to him. It kind of builds this picture of who they were. In Ukraine in March 2023, we had arrived at a building that had been blown up by a Russian artillery that morning. There was a man called Petro. He was 70 years old. And as he'd walked past the explosion in the morning, he'd found that someone's entire collection of books had been blown out of the window and were lying in a rose garden. And he'd just taken it upon himself to begin to stack the books into little piles. He challenged me and said, if this was you, you wouldn't just walk by.

3:29if you saw a loaf of bread on the floor, you'd pick it up. These books are food for the soul. This very, like, grandfatherly figure who didn't want to be on the news and wanted to wander off, who was just doing something so gentle, wouldn't ever have been imagined to exist in Ukraine as we think of it. Drawing allows me the time to find something else that is, in fact, far more human. Olga I met in Kiev. She was 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.

4:11And 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.

4:54and at the end of the war, not knowing what she should do as a 20-year-old woman, she'd begun 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 aged 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 a situation that I would never otherwise have and that's impossible I think to forget

5:47Up 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.

6:15Welcome, 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? I have always drawn. My mum was an art teacher, so that was very much in my life at home in England. But I never knew that this thing that I slowly became obsessed with existed until I found a pile of 1850s Illustrated London news journals in my art school library. And suddenly the thing that I'd been practicing for, which was sitting and drawing outside on the street, anywhere in the world, became real.

7:07And it doesn't really exist as a career path, but I think it's a really valuable way of storytelling at the moment. What do you think the drawing lets you see or understand that a camera or written documentation can't capture in the same kind of way? Well, I think to start with, this is a process that is slow, it's open, it's quite trusted. There's this great intrinsic link between the handmade and being human. Unsurprising that this is the first thing we show our kids. It is the thing that we put on our walls, the thing that we leave in our wills, something handmade. And so there's great power and engagement in that.

7:47I 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, we've become fatigued for all those reasons that 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 going to really want to stick with. Yeah. I mean, 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?

8:30Yes, I can pretend there's some great process to the madness. The genius of the world. Yeah, yeah. 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 into under the skin.

9:09The 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 Kiev 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.

9:53That'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, 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? I think there's two instances.

10:33One is, if it's in the military, and you're drawing typically quite macho practical men then this is something that they're not taking seriously you're sitting in the corner you're not being in any way threatening and after an hour or so you've suddenly made a drawing and heard their stories but there's no photograph no one felt uncomfortable it's not going to stand up in a court of law but you have had an insight and the other version and I think it works for both is in those quiet moments when you're you're drawing the people who don't want to be heroes and are embarrassed by the fact that you're asking them questions.

11:09And this was the case a lot in Syria recently and a lot in Ukraine. It gives, I think, just such dignity and meaning that somebody could be bothered to sit and make a drawing. This is still like a language that transcends verbal language and that somebody took care to sit and listen and ask questions and spend time and keep a record, I suppose, of what was said, I think is really powerful. I mean, it sounds like from how you're describing it, that there's also a kind of gentleness to it. I mean, as you said, I think you just use the word care, and you've spoken about how it's slower. Do you feel like that is part of what helps build trust?

11:51Is that it's more unassuming? As you said, there's a sense of, I don't know, gentleness and care and slowness in the act. Yeah, I was just phrased deliberately slow. But But in the first instance, it gives you a reason not to be a voyeur and just be standing around on the street watching, which can feel difficult. And then there's something more. You're right, the question's good. There's something more than just you spent time. It's something about translating their picture or their situation onto a page in ink to be held as a record forevermore. You're almost drawing what war often rubs out or erases.

12:30Are there things that your process and practice of drawing allows that can capture in a different way some of that more sensitive information or stories? I'm just curious if anything comes to mind, a story or a situation that would have been too dangerous or challenging for other journalists to do in the same kind of way. Yeah I'm always making a case for drawing to exist in addition to photography as well but there is an area isn't there that allows drawing to be a thing when cameras are banned. And the first instance is in courtrooms, not in the UK, but I drew a neo-Nazi terror trial in the German courts a few years ago.

13:14Cameras were banned, but I was given permission to sit in the court and draw for several days whilst Beate Chape was convicted of a terror charge on her accomplices. and then there have been other times as well most recently in Syria some really sensitive issues around sex and ethnicities after the fall and around the massacres that were happening in Latakia in the coastal region at the time and one in particular that I remember a young trans man called Aden who wouldn't I don't think have ever considered having his photograph taken for the newspapers to give a sense of difficulty in his own language in Arabic.

13:55He still referred to his pronouns as she, her, but in English he was he, him. And that was a moment where I was allowed to sit and draw and listen to his story. I think it wouldn't have otherwise happened. And I'll give one more example. I spent a few weeks drawing in a maternity hospital in the Panjshir Valley in Afghanistan. And really the only the process of waiting around for two weeks allowed me to draw, on the last day I was invited in, to draw a caesarean section in the ward where largely men were not allowed to be at all, let alone strangers, foreign men. And I mean, you can imagine what it's like anyway, just to witness that, but to stand and draw as this little boy was delivered via C-section was probably one of the most extraordinary things I will ever scratch onto a page.

14:47Those are very intimate moments that drawing allowed me to witness. I mean, you also talk about the story of, you know, Petro and this, you know, act of gentleness that you were able to witness and capture that we wouldn't usually see in Ukraine. And those, I think, all those examples you just gave are things that we don't usually experience in the mainstream media. So what are some things that you think rarely get shared in the news, but that you think are really essential for understanding the people that you meet? Mm-hmm. There are two things happening. One is that drawing from life on location, and we just sort of discussed this earlier, allows time and access and care for people.

15:34But the second part is maybe that the human-led, unsensational stories that you and I would find interesting or that journalists would find interesting, and many of my friends do exactly this, are often not the ones that make it onto the front page or into the headlines. Petro was one of them. Unsung hero, walked past, collected a pile of books from an explosion and stacked them up and then wandered off. When the cameras came, he literally said, I'm just a normal person. I don't want to be asked questions by journalists. In Ukraine, one of my friends as a journalist pointed me in the direction of a man called Artem, who was the jellyfish museum keeper.

16:17It's a museum in the middle of Ukraine. and he kept this place running and the jellyfish alive despite the situation, the electricity going off. And he described it as one of the few places in Ukraine that people could come for 10 minutes and not think about the war and just look at these beings that had floated around the earth for 500 million years. And the reason this was interesting is because the newspaper that had asked my friend to write stories about Ukraine didn't want to publish this story because it wasn't exciting enough, it wasn't interesting for their readers. And yet for me, it was one of the most human and powerful moments.

16:56Ordinary, but proud and loyal and resilient and familial and almost grandfatherly. And it seems that those sorts of words are so important for us to remember and take hope from and build different relationships around the world. And yet those aren't the ones that I think that I'm reading or connecting with when I look at the news. And that I think is the media's biggest failing. It doesn't allow room for feeling and empathy, but I think there is artistic sensibility and some subjective value is still important when you're communicating with other human beings. That's my call to action. Yeah. George, how do you view the responsibility of hearing and capturing these stories?

17:46And, you know, what do you feel you need to do afterwards to honor them? I think about it all the time. I think about them all the time. And I don't know if this exists, but I feel like once I've drawn their portraits, that I've also drawn them into my heart, into my head and some of them are extremely moving and sad but overlaying all of them I take great sort of inspiration and energy and drive from their stories because I'm always allowed to see behind the scenes which is people trying to continue their lives in Syria 10 years 15 years after the war I spent three months at the beginning of the year each story that was 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.

19:14And 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, as he described it.

19:51But he decided to stay and fight. And I met him in the east of the country. And we, I think because he was a sort of 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 sort of hesitate to say friendship because they're almost sort of professional and journalistic and yet so much meaning, so much honesty is transferred.

20:34And 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 apologising 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.

21:10So I feel forever kind of attached to 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. And stick with us. We'll be right back after a short break.

21:38Drawing, I think in some ways, could be seen as like a meditation. It's very slow as opposed to a quick shutter click and capturing something in that way. which is I'm curious why you choose to do this work in places that most people are fleeing from very good question I think if I had a camera when I was 20 and thought that I could take a photograph I probably would have been one of those people who are so brilliant at getting to the front and taking those images that we see every day and I think they are still incredibly valuable but I didn't have that I had an art an illustration degree a dip pen a piece of paper and that sensibility that slowness meant that I had to sit a little bit back from the front line in places where people felt comfortable in their houses where war had rolled through in artillery unit dugouts in the metro in Ukraine in Kharkiv where they didn't really want cameras but if I promised not to take a photograph they would let me in for the night and suddenly either through drawing or through, as you say, being slow, there was this different window, different perspective that I found to be a much more common human experience of war than the one that I found on the front page or through my newsfeed on my phone.

22:58And I've just tried to prove over the last 15 years that that is a thing and it should be considered. And so these are places that are fast and kinetic, and And it seems so parochial to sit down with a dip pen and ink, which hasn't been used properly or since the end of the golden age of illustration in the 1930s. The process, I think, is respectful and careful and draws out different conversations. But the relationship between drawing and the audience is also equally important. And I think our relationship with something that's handmade is different from our relationship with something that we consider to be news.

23:35and that's what I'd like to explore more. Yeah, well, it's also interesting just how ubiquitous images are now, right? With social media and everyone having a camera in their pocket on their phone. And that also feels like perhaps that's part of that transition is the skill and the art and the act of drawing is more rare, right? Than just images that are constantly being created and everywhere. I mean, you know, you mentioned AI in that capacity earlier. I guess there's something there that, you know, around the use of AI and how prevalent it is that I'm curious how you think your work and drawing fits in this future.

24:18Yeah. Well, I think that AI has been a really useful tool to describe to audiences how easy it is to provide information that we sort of trust, but we don't quite know where it's come from. It helps blur the lines, doesn't it? And I think one of its questions, one of the things it's trying to define is what makes us human. And so I hope this is true, but I hope it's going to better define creativity as this great human characteristic of which drawing and language and poetry and theatre and experience and shaking someone's hand and looking them in the eye are all things that we value. We cherish those human connections.

24:59And I think more now than ever, it's going to be a vital part of diversifying the newsroom. Otherwise, we're just going to continue to receive the same message, the same images from the Middle East of dust clouds and rubble and trails of cues of human beings. And we need to work out a way of offering something different to inform and engage and make better decisions. And in a way, I welcome AI because it better defines exactly what my role is and exactly what my peers who are journalists is. And that is the value of standing on the street with a notepad and the really unglamorous parts of journalism, which are waiting in a usually quite crap hotel in an obscure part of the world, missing home, hoping that someone's going to ring you back to get the right interview.

25:47and then following as many leads as possible until you have an understanding of what you think fairly represents that place at that time. I think that the effects of AI on news could be positive. It's got great potential to better disseminate those pictures and drawings and bits of text. But also we're up against it. I know that so many articles are being written a day by AI and reproduced and perhaps not even written and edited, just kind of farmed out to standard content. So does that make sense? I don't know whether the two are sort of in opposition to each other. I think it's not binary. Yeah, that's a beautiful answer.

26:33And there's that it makes it more valuable as well, the human to human connection. It's interesting, you know, I have a lot of these conversations with different TED fellows, and it's making me think about one I had fairly recently with an eye surgeon, Andrew Bastaurus, who was saying something very similar, but from the perspective of just what it allows if you're in a doctor's office, and you decide to take time instead of being more and more efficient. And what does that allow for that kind of sense of compassion and human connection. And so it is interesting that in this moment of everything moving faster and AI generation that, you know, how do we take that time to slow down and connect human to human and utilize the tools in that way.

27:16And I often think that people tell me stories like a family doctor. They're not going to tell their husbands or their children, but in a different language, when no one else is in the room, it feels safe to say something, to share something that they might not otherwise have done so. I know that you've written and illustrated Two beautiful books, Drawing Across Borders, True Stories of Migration, and Ukraine, Remember Also Me. Can you tell us a bit more about these projects? The first one, Drawing Across Borders, was, like all good first books, completely unplanned. And I had come back from Afghanistan and Palestine and Syria and Tajikistan.

28:01It was 10 years of work, and I realised that the thing that I had been inadvertently drawing was people moving around the earth. That is a proportion of the world that gets bigger all the time. It's going to define the next century, how we treat each other, the laws that we make. And it already is in our respective countries, the US and the UK, defining politics. But all I had was 12 stories of individuals who had done that. and so I put them together in a book, tried to disband some of those myths that, you know, they're taking our jobs or they never go home or they're coming here to, in our case, use the NHS and not pay any taxes.

28:41In a way, I think we've all failed and I've failed because drawing hasn't been effective or powerful enough in telling that message. Politics has got even more polarising and dangerous and in a way, I feel very proud that it felt so obvious and that those stories could be told. And then in Ukraine, that was much more organized. I set out to interview 25 Ukrainians who I thought wouldn't be on the front pages, who didn't make the news. And as I said before, if when people pick up the book, they think that could have so easily been me, then that is the point. That's the point of the book, really.

29:16So we are speaking right before the end of 2025, and this interview will be coming out in early 2026. You've witnessed some of the worst things of humanity and also probably some of the best. How do you keep yourself going? What are you hopeful for? I think that it's so easy to forget that all of the stories that we've talked about, but also that I've drawn in the last 20 years, are continuing as we speak. Today, for example, is exactly a year on from when I went back to Syria, a year of freedom for Syrians, a day that most of them had waited for. and that was a really unexpected moment after a particularly dark and difficult time for for Syrians decades of abhorrent dictatorship and so I take great I think more than hope I think it needs I think we need to sort of begin stop hoping and start having faith for me it's in the Syrians and Ukrainians that I got to spend time with nobody deserves hope more than them so I kind of take their lead and that is the overriding feeling for me it's not it's not one of sadness or feeling helpless or I want to turn the news off I think it's so easy to be cynical about these places and come up with lists of why it can't work and won't work but I find that I owe it to the people that I sat and drew to be to be positive and hopeful and share their stories because if we don't react then then it really won't change George as always it's been such a pleasure getting to talk to you.

30:56Thank you for this. Thanks, Lily.

31:02That was George Butler, a 2025 TED Fellow. To learn more about the TED Fellows program and watch all the TED Fellows films, go to fellows.ted.com. And that's it for today. This episode was produced by Lucy Little, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact-checked by Eva Dasher. The The audio you heard at the top comes from the short film made by Divya Gdenghi and Owen McLean. Story edited by Corey Hajim and produced by Ian Lowe. Video production manager is Searing Dolma. Additional support from Lily James Olds, Leonie Horster, and Allegra Pearl. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.

31:40Our team includes Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonsika Sungmarnivong. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.