Here's an uncomfortable truth: most readers don't stop to look. They scroll past the illustration, skim the headline, maybe read the first paragraph, and move on. The image that took an artist hours of craft, revision, and conceptual thought gets roughly the same attention as a sponsored post for protein powder.
And yet the editorial illustrator persists. Simon Letch, whose regular gallery of work appears in the Sydney Morning Herald, is among the finest practitioners of this quietly extraordinary form in Australia. His illustrations don't decorate journalism. They interpret it, compress it, sometimes subvert it entirely. That's a different and more demanding job than it looks.
The conventional wisdom holds that visual journalism means photography, video, and infographics. The conventional wisdom is miserly.
Photography captures what happened. Infographics explain how. Illustration asks what it means. It is, in the language of the craft, an argument made in pictures. A good editorial illustration can crystallise the absurdity of a policy debate, the moral weight of a public tragedy, or the black comedy of political life in ways that a thousand well-chosen words might not manage. This is not sentiment. It is function.
A Craft Under Pressure
Australia's creative industries have faced structural pressure for years. The shift to digital publishing gutted illustration budgets at many mastheads, as editors discovered that stock image licences were cheaper than commissioning original art. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has documented the precarity of the visual arts sector across successive cultural economy surveys, and the story for commercial illustrators has rarely been encouraging.
The argument from media accountants is straightforward: readers engage with the text, not the art. Strip away the illustration, reduce the overheads, and the journalism survives. This argument is not entirely wrong. But it is dangerously incomplete.
What it misses is the signal function of serious illustration. When a publication invests in original visual commentary, it signals something about its own seriousness. It tells readers that ideas matter enough to warrant artistic interpretation, not just stock imagery of businesspeople shaking hands in front of flag arrays. That signal, once lost, is hard to rebuild.
The debate over arts funding in Australia has long foundered on exactly this kind of short-term accounting. Successive governments, across both major parties, have treated cultural expenditure as discretionary during budget pressures. Submissions to parliamentary inquiries into arts funding consistently show the sector arguing for recognition of its economic multiplier effects, only to be heard politely and then overlooked when the numbers are tight.
The Other Side of the Ledger
To be fair to the sceptics: not all illustration adds genuine value, and not all arguments for arts funding are made in good faith. There is a version of the case for editorial art that is really just a guild protecting its margins. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's ongoing work on the economics of digital news platforms is a reminder that the pressures squeezing illustration budgets originate partly in structural market failures, not just editorial philistinism. Publishers are navigating genuinely hostile economics.
None of that changes what Letch's work represents. The craft of translating a complex news moment into a single, striking, original image is rarer and more difficult than the industry currently prices it. That the Herald continues to publish his gallery is, at minimum, evidence that some editorial decision-makers understand what they'd be losing.
Strip away the rhetoric and ask the simple question: what does a news organisation look like when it stops investing in original visual thought? It looks like every other news organisation. Which is to say, it looks like none of them in particular.
We deserve a better debate than this. And occasionally, we get better art.
Originally reported by the Sydney Morning Herald. Simon Letch's illustration gallery is published regularly at smh.com.au.