Photographers are often not allowed at a trial for practical reasons such as the anonymity of people there. Therefore, the role of the illustrator is to describe the situation through their sketches.
Even though the illustrator will try to describe the truth, it will be the truth as they perceive it. Franklin McMahon’s sketches describe his interpretation of what happened in the courtoom. He chose the moment he wanted to capture and even combined several moments as it is explained in a New York Times’ article (https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/us/franklin-mcmahon-who-drew-the-news-dies-at-90.html): “Photographers capture a moment, he said, but he could combine moments, often hours apart, into a single picture and thereby convey, he believed, a larger truth. He might, for example, pluck images from a political convention — a balloon drop, a speaker, a network camera — that never appeared together, and put them in the same frame.”
Conveying a faithful representation of what happened is essential for Franklin McMahon and combining different elements is a way to achieve this, something that would not be possible with photography. At the same time, contrary to photography, he would have had to work fast to capture a significant moment and an illustration does not contain all the details of a picture. According to the same article in the New York Times, he described himself as a reporter, not an artist or illustrator. This says a lot about what he was trying to achieve.
The body language is very important in his sketches. His characters always seem to be in movement even they are sitting. For instance, a lady might have her arm resting on the back of the chair next to her while a man is leaning back and another one is slouching. In one of his sketches describing the jury, each person has a position indicating their frame of mind: relaxed, distracted, concentrated,…The expression on their faces also tells us how they feel, although he was not a portraitist and did not draw faces with many details.
We still see regularly sketches in the news about a trial. In fact, recently, we have seen some sketches illustrating the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell. In an article in the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/dec/15/my-life-is-weird-the-court-artist-who-drew-ghislaine-maxwell-drawing-her-back), Jane Rosenberg, the illustrator who is the author of these drawings talks about her experience as a courtroom illustrator. Her style is quite different from Franklin MacMahon. She works with pastels and as a trained portraitist, she focusses a lot on the expressions of the characters she draws.
But she also describes how she tries not to be emotionally involved so as to report the truth and how courtroom illustrators sometimes have to work very fast.
According to the New York Times, Franklin MacMahon said that “His goal was to step beyond what he considered the limitations of photography to “see around corners.”” In a sense we could say that he turned a constraint (not being able to take pictures) into an asset.
Catherine Roux Degree in Illustration 