Janet Hamlin (artist)
| Janet Hamlin | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | courtroom artist |
Janet Hamlin is an American artist.[1][2][3] She is notable for providing the courtroom sketches in all the Guantanamo military commissions. She has also prepared book covers and movie posters. She is a technical illustrator credited with illustrating dozens of books.
Hamlin told interviewers her father was in the US military, and she grew up on military bases.[4]
She studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.[1]
The first time she drew alleged 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, she had to alter the drawings she made of him because he complained she made his nose too big.[1][2][3][5][6] The images she drew of him in 2008 were the first to be made public since his capture and secret detention in 2003.
In 2013 Hamlin published Sketching Guantanamo: Court Sketches of the Military Tribunals 2006–2013.[7][8] Fellow journalist Carol Rosenberg contributed a foreword, and chapters by journalists Michelle Sheppard and Jane Sutton, and lawyers Jon Jackson, and Karen J. Greenberg.
The New York Review of Books published an excerpt from her book.[9]
Hamlin was interviewed about the book, multiple times.[4][10]
In her review in the Los Angeles Review of Books Jillian Steinhauer questioned Hamlin's efforts to be objective in her coverage, suggesting Guantanamo was too highly charged a topic for true objectivity to be possible.[8] She went on to write, however, "Given these circumstances, Hamlin’s animated, colorful, and detailed sketches constitute a nearly heroic effort."
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Mohammed Al Shafey. Q & A with Guantanamo Courtroom Artist Janet Hamlin, Asharq Alawsat, 2010-06-10. Retrieved on 2010-06-15.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Ben McGrath. By A Nose, 2008-07-07. Retrieved on 2010-06-15. “'It’s the hardest job I’ve ever done,' Hamlin said of Guantánamo. There were a couple of baseball caps on the shelf behind her, featuring an embroidered message on the back: 'It don’t GTMO better than this.' She said that she has grown to appreciate some of the smaller 'heartwarming touches,' such as the soldiers’ placing an orchid in the women’s lavatory, but that she could do without the knowledge that the bottled water she’d been drinking was chilled in an oversized refrigerator nicknamed 'the morgue.' She said, 'It’s a little macabre.'”
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 9/11 Suspect: Artist Drew My Nose Too Big, CBS News, 2008-06-05. Retrieved on 2010-06-15. “No photographers were allowed inside the courtroom for the first appearance of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four alleged coconspirators on war crimes charges. So it fell to artist Janet Hamlin to provide the world with the first image of the Al-Qaeda kingpin since his capture in Pakistan in 2003.”
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Sketching Guantanamo: Janet Hamlin, CBC Radio, 2013-03-26. Retrieved on 2023-10-11.
- ↑ http://www.usatoday.com/news/topstories/2008-06-05-3373294059_x.htm Andrew O. Selsky. Alleged 9/11 plotter says artist made nose too big, USA Today, 2008-06-05. Retrieved on 2010-06-16.
- ↑ Jess Bravin. A Nose Job, Wall Street Journal, 2008-06-05. Retrieved on 2010-06-16.
- ↑ Janet Hamlin (2013). Sketching Guantanamo: Court Sketches of the Military Tribunals 2006–2013. Fantagraphics Books. ISBN 9781606996911. Retrieved on 2023-10-11.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Jillian Steinhauer. Sketching Injustice: The Official Court Drawings From Guantanamo Bay, Los Angeles Review of Books, 2013-10-17. Retrieved on 2023-10-11. “Hamlin sees herself as more than a court artist; as she writes in the book, she considers her work 'visual journalism.' In that case, the questions become even more pressing: Is objectivity possible, and is it optimal? Is there a point at which neutrality becomes complicity?”
- ↑ Janet Hamlin. Sketches from Guantánamo: A selection of drawings and commentary from the artist who has documented the Guantanamo Bay hearings since 2006., New York Review of Books, 2013-10-17. Retrieved on 2023-10-11.
- ↑ Muira McCammon, Daniel Grinberg. GITMO MEDIA: VISUALIZING INJUSTICE – PART II, Center for Media at Risk, 2019-07-16. Retrieved on 2023-10-11.