Today, photography continues to occupy an ambiguous position between art and non-art. But I would argue that this indeterminate position is actually one of photography’s greatest strengths because it holds a subversive political and artistic potential. As an outward-looking medium, photography is also inevitably derivative as it always seeks to mimic, copy or emulate aspects of other mediums such as painting—just as much as it mimics and copies ‘the real.’ For better or worse, photography’s equivocal position as art (but also its inferiority complex) is still the engine that keeps the medium moving: both forward and backward… So illustration (or illustrating illustration so to speak) struck me as a relatively unassuming way to think about much bigger questions pertaining to the contentious history of photography’s political potential.