In praise of picture editors

Andrei Zorin's account of War and Peace as Tolstoy's "total explanation of the current state of Russia" is now freely available on our website. This is just one horse in a Tolstoyan troika, however, passing splendidly through the village at pace: anyone who is curious, or even passionate, about Tolstoy will find more to enjoy in this week's TLS, as a glance at the issue's contents page will reveal.

That glance won't reveal the unsung feats of our pictures editor Martin Smith in bringing together, as illustrations for the same issue, a kind of miniature picture gallery inspired by the Russian master, including art by the Russian master himself: his doodles in a manuscript of Anna Karenina. . . .

There is also René-Xavier Prinet's study for "The Kreutzer Sonata", which blurrily represents pianist and violinist in a passionate (and jealously imagined?) embrace, and a striking still from Sergei Bondarchuk's film of War and Peace to complement Zorin's essay. The wood engraving on this week's cover, meanwhile, derives from the cover of an obscurity: Anissia: The life-story of a Russian peasant, an autobiographical work in which Tolstoy had a revising hand.

I suspect that that pictures editors don't get the praise they deserve. Like sub-editors and proofreaders, their existence tends to be noticed by readers only when a mistake slips through – such as our nodding acceptance once of the incorrect date for a photograph of D. H. Lawrence provided by a picture library ("Lawrence had no beard in 1908", a distressed professor observed), or the Guardian's unfortunate reproduction of a painting of the wrong John Aubrey last week, distracting from an excellent review of Ruth Scurr's new book about him – but the best of their work goes unacknowledged.

Obtaining permission to use an image from eccentric copyright holders, identifying the right mugshot amid thousands of irrelevant ones, fitting the right picture to the right space on the page: these aren't always simple matters, especially in the face of an implacable deadline. According to Martin, online picture libraries have made the job easier, whereas once "you had to rely on how a library picture researcher's interpretation of your search without really knowing the paper's picture style". The real art remains unchanged, however: "to seek out the obscure picture sources where you can find the pictures not seen a hundred times in other publications". (Have pictures editors ever been celebrated in Fleet Street fiction, by the way, beyond the vile figure of Michael Frayn's Reg Mounce in Towards the End of the Morning? I hope so, but they don't come readily to mind.)

Different publications set their picture editors different challenges, and there are obvious options for literary papers – book covers and author photos – that some use exclusively, as part of an overall design strategy, or sparingly, as contributions to a general variety. The TLS belongs in the second camp, where all the challenges of knowing how to illustrate a book review about ontology and where to find a photo of Glastonbury Tor rising above the obscured plains of Somerset (see below) reside. When I asked Martin about this, he also told me about a trend among publicists that originates in the cult of celebrity ("the bane of my life", he said, forgetting about copyright permissions for a moment). "I will put an exhibition or new film in the search box and get twelve pages of Z-list celebs attending the opening night and six images of the exhibits or stills." It is another publication, I'm guessing, that necessitates those first twelve pages.

And then there was the time he was asked to provide – not for the TLS, I hasten to add – an image of a "hippopotamus behaving strangely during a solar eclipse" . "I have to confess I had to resort to Photoshop for that one. . . ."

 

"The mist covers all memories, the bad as well as the good": A line from The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel, Toby Lichtig's review of which appears in this week's TLS, accompanied by the photo above (Stephen Spraggon/Alamy)