News tells you what happened. Drawing shows you how it felt | George Butler

Elise Hu (0:04)

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh.

Every day, all day, images of war flash across our screens. Blown open buildings, scattered lives, rubble where a home used to be. It's constant, and if I'm honest, there are nights it leaves me feeling numb or helpless, or mainly just wanting to look away. Maybe you know the feeling, for reportage artist and TED fellow George Butler, it's different. He spent two decades in places like Ukraine, Syria, and Gaza doing something that runs counter to that rush of images. He sits down, and slowly, he draws.

George Butler (0:44)

The news can tell us what happened, but the drawing can show us how it felt.

Elise Hu (0:50)

You may remember George from a conversation we shared last year with TED fellow's program director, Lily James Olds. He talked about his medium, ink on paper in the middle of conflict zones, for magazines and newspapers, has allowed him to go deeper than the headlines. This time, he brought that work to the TED stage. In his talk, George shares the stories of the people he's met in places under bombardment, and he makes a quiet case for a different way of paying attention, to witness these stories rather than just consume them, to slow down and to hold on to our connection to one another.

George Butler (1:24)

I believe the news is failing us. It promotes destruction before humanity.

Elise Hu (1:31)

Drawing, he says, is almost an excuse. What it really buys him is time, time to sit with one person long enough to hear their story. And the people you'll hear about in this talk, found in the rubble, in hospital beds, at the very edges of catastrophe, are impossible to forget. The talk is coming up, right after a short break.

And now, our TED Talk of the Day.

George Butler (2:01)

A couple of years ago, I stood on the streets in eastern Ukraine, in Kramatorsk, in the aftermath of a Russian cruise missile strike on a residential apartment building.

I remember the front of the building was blown off. You could see a living room and a kitchen inside, belongings burnt, scattered on the floor, mixed in with the rubble. There were some weapons inspectors on one side, an excavator in the middle. And of course, in amongst it all, the journalists were there, trying to interview those involved. One lady in particular had soot on her face. It was very moving to watch. She gathered her belongings from the rubble and she put them on the floor, and she sat on them for safekeeping. These are the sorts of scenes that are broadcast around the world every night. I found them to be so moving. And let me tell you, the destruction is truly captivating.

But around the back of the same building, I found a library of books had been blasted into a rose garden. And in amongst the thorns and the roses stood Petro, age 70 On his morning walk, he couldn't go any further. He felt it was his duty to stop, pick up the books, stack them in neat little piles.

And as I drew him, he challenged me, and he said, I was brought up, that if I see a loaf of bread on the floor, I'll pick it up. It's the same with books. They are food for the soul. I've drawn mass graves in Ukraine, a Cesarean in Afghanistan, and the war in Syria. And over two decades, I've had one realization over and over, that there are many truths to war. But on that morning in Kramatorsk, in Ukraine, it was so stark. It was Petro that captured my heart, this gentle soul standing amidst atrocity.

This is what I do. I draw for magazines and newspapers in ink, on location, and over weeks and weeks in Ukraine, it became my mission to be slow, to delve deeper. And I found that the news can tell us what happened, but the drawing can show us how it felt. In Kyiv, I met Madame Olga, age 99 She was too old to get out of her bed when the air raid sirens rang. I remember she had a Bible tucked under her pillow. She was very muddled. She was confusing Putin and Hitler, and she held the translator's hands about six inches from her face. And in this moment of wonderful clarity, she said, if you be quiet, I will tell you the story from the beginning. She was born in 1923 She was taken to a collective farm with her father. She survived the Holodomor, the great famine which killed four million Ukrainians. When World War II started, she worked as a slave for a Nazi family. She recounted the story about one time they fed her worms. She ran away on another occasion to the police station, but the policeman returned her straight back to the house. When the war ended, she began to walk home to Ukraine. She met her husband on the way, future husband, I should say. They got married. She had four children. She lived another 80 years. If it hadn't been for the process of drawing, I wouldn't have shared this moment with Olga, and I wouldn't be able to share it with you. She died a couple of months after we met, peacefully in her sleep before her 100th birthday.