It is always interesting to see where art is created. Here, for example, in the jury courtroom of the Berlin district court. It’s about organized crime, assault and extortion. And yet an artist is sitting in a corner, drawing delicate lines on a piece of paper with a pencil and black fineliner.
In German courts, photos, film and sound recordings are prohibited during a hearing. But you can write down or draw what you experience. Felicitas Loroch is a court draftsman. She looks around the room, stares at someone. And then, with quick movements, she sketches faces, gestures, robes.
How do you become that? She always liked to draw people, says Loroch. First in the subway, but the encounters there were too fleeting for her. So she went to court, “people don’t run away from you there”. Her first trial was one of the most spectacular, it was about the terrorist attack in the West Berlin discotheque La Belle at the end of the 1980s. Today Loroch, 66, works as a freelance artist, there are not many newspapers that print court drawings. But she still goes to processes. Because she hears stories here that you wouldn’t hear otherwise, because she finds out what makes people special. And she can condense all of that into one drawing.
Criminals too, she thinks, deserve not to be caricatured
Loroch has seen a lot. Robbers, shoplifters, professional criminals, mothers who have harmed their children. At first she tried to read the facial expressions to see if someone was telling the truth. Now she just wants to work out who someone is. She wants to show every accused person as humanly as possible, she says, and even a criminal deserves not to be caricatured. And sometimes she wonders if she might be offending the people in court. A drawing not only depicts someone, but also what another believes to recognize in him.
At first glance, court drawings seem to have fallen out of time. They only exist because there is a kind of ban on images in trials, as is otherwise the case with religious ceremonies. And yet, in an age of constant filming and streaming, they almost have something avant-garde about them. Like the sketches from the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, who was on trial in New York in 2021 as an accomplice to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. They’re not just memorable for their bright colors and expressive faces. The drawings of the accused, the witnesses and the spectators were the only thing that the public got to see of the trial. Cameras were not allowed. Reality could only be experienced through art.