One of our Research Students has produced the cover art for a recent issue of the New York Review of Books.
The student is Julien Porquet – who, under the name Julien Posture, has provided illustrations for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review and The Guardian.
Julien – a PhD student in Cambridge since 2022 – researches the production of values and creative subjectivities in the illustration industry in New York in an exploration of the ‘linguistic economy of looking’. It was in connection with his research that he made contact with the Review’s Leanne Shapton.
“I originally met the art director of the NYRB during my fieldwork to chat about her work,” Julien said. “She's also an artist and writer and her approach to art direction is different from other publications. Rather than strictly conceptual or literal, the relationship between image and text at the NYRB is looser, more open. It also commissions non-illustrative artists, like painters, which creates unexpected results."
Julien’s work appeared on the cover of the NYRB issue of 19 September. With that cover, he had the freedom to explore a maximalist take on the theme of Fall/Autumn, setting the stage for a dense cast of characters and items.
As well as contributing the Review’s cover art, Julien recorded an interview with Leanne Shapton: “I got to explain what my PhD project was about and talk about my research to their audience, which was exciting,” he explains. Under the resonant title Ways of Seeing, the interview appears on the NYRB website. Throughout his research, he has found that his identity as an artist is impossible to disentangle from his identity as an ethnographer.
See Julien Posture’s website here.
