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Go Behind The Scenes with Illustrator Christoph Niemann | National Geographic

2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

You come to Cambodia and Vietnam going down the Mekong River, and you learn a lot here. The biggest realization I had was the only exotic thing here is me. This place has been around for 2,000 years; everything is perfectly normal. But this, for me, is the travel experience: questioning also your normal by going to a place that has a different kind of normal.

My name is Christophe Neiman. I'm an illustrator, and over the years, I always drew when I traveled. One of the most important things for me when I do these trips is not to have any preconceived notions. You come there, and of course, I feel the creative pressure to create a story in time where the good images are. But you have to live a little bit, and you have to allow for something to happen.

I go back and forth between your mind and the place when I make a drawing. What I do is utterly subjective. I look at a landscape that consists of a million different elements, and I've picked some out and made the bigger sum — through conscious decisions, some through just unconscious. Over there's this tree; I happen to have red ink, so now the tree is red. You filter the world through the limitations of ink on paper.

Another aspect that's very important for me when I create an image is a certain kind of contrast, and drawing is great because you can amplify contrasts. We go to Angkor Wat in the morning for sunrise, which is an incredible moment. But even though it's an incredible moment, I've seen pictures of that before. So, you pair it against the photos that you've seen. Real life has a lot of people with cellphones scrambling for the right position to get the right moment of the Sun reflecting in the water lily pond.

I think you can take this stock photo postcard moment that you have stored somewhere and check that against the reality. My goal for a reader is to look at that and say, "Yeah, that's my travel experience." It's not this perfect 4K; everything's amazing; every detail is photoshopped out. But it's like the moment where something is a little off. I think it becomes interesting where I see what I do is really being like a scientific amateur and almost, you know, kind of turning the lens on myself and how I experience this amazing world.

I almost feel like I'm the reader who then gets to stand in the middle of the story and we just see what happens. [Music]

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