Truth or Consequences
A 79 year old scoreboard still telling the score.
I had no idea what I was getting myself into in 2009 when I accepted a picture book commission celebrating Jackie Robinson’s first game as a Brooklyn Dodger. I spent 4 months researching every aspect of that day April 15th, 1947. But the scoreboard continued to elude me. Another illustrator had done a stunning portrait with the scoreboard partially cropped, but the part unseen included 1946.
Robinson’s story was so incredible, as he not only broke the color barrier in baseball he transformed the game through his aggressive base stealing. I felt like every detail mattered and the scoreboard became a critical part of telling the story of the day. It was the New York Public Library and their holdings of sports photography that lead to the answer. I found a photographer who had taken images of Jackie Robinson that day and in the library archive there was a shot the photographer had taken with the scoreboard. Finally success.
Every year I offer a presentation with our faculty Librarian, Sam Cheng about Copyright and IP, for the Year 1 Illustration students. This year we added research and AI, and you can likely guess this generated image was a part of the discussion. I prompted an image of Jackie Robinson on April 15th, 1947 and the scoreboard for that game.
The resulting image was Jackie Robinson looking older and wearing the wrong uniform with buttons and blue sleeves. He has the wrong baseball glove —he originally played first base. The scoreboard is totally made up. At no point did the scoreboard have Ebbets Field displayed across it. But there is something much more important than the historical details that this image gets wrong.
The generated image looks like a baseball card image and Robinson appears confident and sure of himself. There was incredible pressure on Robinson that day and I wanted to show that in my image, looking down and concentrating on his glove in his hand. I am so glad I was able to research the man himself and create an image that tells the story of April 15th, 1947. This is what I mean when I say you can’t unsee a generated image.
The distortion and freedom of expression in my figures is central to the point of view that the images develop through the research process. I move away from the photographic and the defined, and deeper into the emotive story. Even though this is a non-fiction book, I believe my job is to conjure the visual dynamic and real essence of the story.
I grew up playing and watching baseball. My high school history teacher Reno Bertoia was a former Detroit Tiger and he had a few of us help out with Hat and Ball Day (giving out free hats and baseballs for young fans) and then we would watch the game behind home plate. The memories of Tiger stadium, watching the Toronto Blue Jays win the World Series, and the months of research were distilled into images that I hoped would capture the joy of the sport. A sport that finally embraced great athletes and their story and culture.
The journey I took to find the elusive scoreboard offered me the time to see Jackie Robinson as both a man weighed down by his role, and free and unburdened on the base paths. The stories we share, the images we create, and the music we make come from a deep well we can draw from, and what we take and add to that collective pool is what helps us to thrive. It’s not the breadth, it’s the depth that we need to feed our stories.
The LLM was asked to provide specific information particular to a specific date in what must be considered the distant past in terms of the internet. It is interesting that it would be programmed to provide nonsense rather than just state that the assignment led to a void and the question couldn’t be answered definitively. Good thing you knew what you were looking for because I would have been fooled. This is a good example of the danger of diving into a shallow pool.
This is great