Opening a Sketchbook and Finding a Spark Some photographs start with a sketch. Ina Jang, the photographer behind this past weekend's cover story on restitution for victims of child pornography, has been keeping sketchbooks since 2006. It was that year that Jan arrived in New York to study at the School of Visual Arts (Jang grew up in Seoul and later lived in Tokyo). She always draws in a black Moleskine, with a pen, never a pencil. It must be a Japanese pen, the Mitsubishi Uniball SIGNO, which has a very fine point. Jang buys them at Kinokuniya, a Japanese bookstore across from Bryant Park. If she doesn't have this pen with her, she doesn't draw. Jang opened her sketchbooks for us to reveal the ways her drawings have informed her photography. As part of her ongoing work dealing with themes of obscurity and identity, Jang began making images using tracing paper as a way of masking part of the identity of her subject, while at the same time letting some details come through. It was this work that led us to commission Jang to make this week's cover and inside opening photograph. We knew we wanted to make portraits of the women featured in the article without revealing their identities. We felt that Jang's sensibility would bring just the right combination of emotional power and graphic strength to the portraits, and at the same time protect their anonymity. Below, a sketch and photograph that inspired the work Jang did for our article: The inspiration for the drawing below came from seeing a woman with red hair standing on the Bedford L subway platform. Jang knew she wanted to make the picture about the red hair, so she added red yarn to elongate it. The idea for the following sketch came when Jang saw two girls who looked alike. She knew she wanted to make a clean, simple image, for which she used four socks to connect the two girls. She found the blue wall in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Jang drew this bird because she realized that she had written a sad entry on the last page of a journal and she wanted to lighten things up. At this point, Jang was exploring notions of identity and anonymity in her work. She wanted to completely obscure someone's face, so she had this plywood cut into an oval shape to be held up as a mask. Jang was exploring structures and patterns. The idea for a polka-dot floor with one erect polka dot rising from the sea of dots came to her mind. She knew from the start she wanted one black circle to be folded upward. Here, Jang continued to work with obscuring certain elements in her images. Jang made the sketch and photograph below for her first assignment for The Times Magazine. The grid of photographs was published on the table of contents of the Aug. 22, 2010, issue with the cover story "What Is it About 20-Somethings?" For that issue we asked a group of 13 young photographers, including Jang, to make photographs of 18-to-29-year-olds using an iPhone camera. Jang acknowledged the recurring themes in her work. When I interviewed her, she said that she sometimes thinks she has a new idea, only to go back to an old journal and find that the idea was already there.