Documentary pictorial books combine text, drawings, infographics, cartographic maps and photographs to provide visual evidence of complex historical events and wartime atrocities that have been suppressed. These books plead for historical redress and justice. Books such as Palestine: Postcards and Palestine in Stamps (1865-1981) act as historical documents and archaeological traces, providing both visual and material evidence of a place and a people denied existence. The book’s content and argument in such cases rest primarily on its visual narrative. Its making, from collecting the artifacts and gathering information surrounding them to designing and publishing, is in and of itself a collaborative act of resistance against historical erasure. Likewise, illustrated wartime diaries chronicle the harrowing day-to-day life of civilians under assault; they respond to the ethics of witnessing and visually mediate collective memory.

With less claim to documentary objectivity, but with a similar urge to bear witness and aesthetically mobilise the politics of anticolonial solidarity, artists and poets have collaboratively responded with words and images that hold deep emotional charges. The artist’s book, self-authored or collaborative, embodies in its visuality and materiality a political act of solidarity. The artwork here lies not in the single drawing on the page. Art is rather made in and through the reproducible and circulatory power of the book as a communicative and performative act.

The therapeutic exercise of creative free expression that children enjoy, using colour and paint, also offers a solid record of their lifeworld and the imaginative realms they inhabit. As innocent witnesses, children provide a raw testimonial to the violence and injustice that structure their lives during wartime. Their drawings, as compiled into books, reveal damning visual evidence that makes for deeply uncomfortable viewing/reading. Warplanes, wretched refugee camps, bombed homes, machine guns, death, and fear are normalised into everyday life scenes mediated through a child’s eyes, haunting their imagination and shaping their understanding of the world. The reader is confronted at once with the universal innocence of a child’s colourful drawings and the particularity of the violent conditions that challenge this very innocence. It is the affective and documentary tension that resides in the visual narrative of these books that makes for their testimonial power.