Documentary pictorial books combine text, drawings, infographics, maps, and photographs to provide visual evidence of complex historical events and wartime atrocities often suppressed. These books serve as powerful pleas for historical redress and justice. Works such as Palestine: Postcards and Palestine in Stamps (1865-1981) act as both historical documents and archaeological traces, offering visual and material evidence of a place and a people long denied existence.

In these books, the content and argument are primarily driven by their visual narratives. The act of creating them—from collecting artifacts and gathering information to designing and publishing—is itself a collaborative act of resistance against historical erasure. Similarly, illustrated wartime diaries document the harrowing day-to-day lives of civilians under assault, responding to the ethics of witnessing while visually mediating collective memory.

With less claim to documentary objectivity, but with a similar urge to bear witness and mobilise the politics of anticolonial solidarity, artists and poets have responded collaboratively, using words and images charged with deep emotional meaning. In these works, the book, whether self-authored by an artist or created through collaboration, embodies a political act of solidarity in its visuality and materiality.

Here, the artwork is not confined to a single drawing on the page. Rather, art is made in and through the reproducible and circulatory power of the book as a communicative and performative act.

The therapeutic act of creative expression, through colour and paint, provides children with a powerful means of communication, offering a tangible record of their lifeworld and the imaginative realms they inhabit. As innocent witnesses, children give raw testimony to the violence and injustice that shape their lives during wartime. Their drawings, compiled into books, reveal stark and unsettling viewing/reading experiences.

Warplanes, wretched refugee camps, bombed homes, machine guns, death, and fear are everyday life scenes mediated through a child’s eyes, haunting their imagination and shaping their understanding of the world.

The reader is confronted with the duality of a child’s innocent, colourful drawings and the harsh violence that challenges this very innocence. It is the affective and documentary tension within the visual narratives of these books that makes for their testimonial power.