The 38th edition of the Visa pour l'image photojournalism festival in Perppignan, France, got underway this week in a state of shocked sadness: The event's longtime director, Jean Francois Leroy, died of cancer on Aug. 31, at age 69. Over the years, noted the French newspaper Le Monde, Leroy transformed his festival into a popular success (with more than 220,000 visitors annually), and made it a global meeting place for professionals from across the industry. But he also witnessed, with sadness and anger, the crisis in photojournalism and the impoverishment of photographers.

  While the illustrator Brad Holland may not be a household name, you could say that if anyone represented the power of illustration, over the past half century, to provoke, it would be this artist. Entirely self-taught, he worked his way up from studio rat sweeping floors in a Chicago tattoo parlor to being one of the first in The New York Times’ roster of artists for its new Op Ed page, in 1970. The Watergate scandal offered the kind of material that excited Holland’s co...