07 May 2013 Tags:
Edward Steichen is generally credited as being the pioneer of photobooks for children. The First Picture Book: Everyday Things for Babies, published in 1930 in a two-volume set, was created with his wife, Mary Steichen Calderone. Its clear purpose was to present children with simple objects from their world and let them make a learning connection. It wasn’t much of a commercial success, but this first foray into children’s photobook publishing was followed by many more over the ensuing decades, including such notable contributions as Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon, with stills from the 30-minute cinematic masterpiece of the same name, and Dare Wright’s The Lonely Doll, the first book of its kind to make the New York Times Best Sellers list, both published in 1957.
Eikoh Hosoe’s Taka Chan and I, which came a decade later, relating the adventures of a dog and a little girl travelling across Japan, is another enduring children’s classic, while Will MacBride’s Show Me! of 1974 very much reflects a new era and a new morality – a sex education manual illustrated with images of nude children. Tana Hoban was a prolific author of children’s photobooks between 1970 and 2000, selling more than two million copies, as has William Wegman, creating 17 canine-related titles aimed at kids from the 1990s onwards.
Over the past decade or so, interest in this little niche has picked up momentum, with well-established photographers such as Abelardo Morrell, Polly Borland, Graciela Iturbide and James Mollison producing books aimed at children, alongside their acclaimed art and documentary projects. Last year, Lorna Freytag published Wild Child with Walker Books, which went on to be longlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal for children’s illustration (the results of which are announced next month), while David Robinson created The Mushroom Picker, made with Violette Editions, whose previous books include titles by French artists Sophie Calle and Louise Bourgeois.
Little Steidl, an imprint of Steidl that specialises in artists’ books aimed at readers of all ages, is reintroducing itself this autumn as a standalone publisher, having taken over one of its parent company’s printing presses. In addition, curators Susan Bright and Hedy van Erp are working on a photography book for teenagers which they hope to publish in the next year or two.
Alec Soth, who started collecting children’s photography books a couple of years ago, agrees. He also believes the future may be in photobooks created by children for children, having already made a couple with his son and daughter Carmen and Gus – The Brighton Bunny Boy and Bunny Boy Goes to Rome – published under his own imprint, Little Brown Mushroom. “Everything is changing,” he comments. “With smartphones, kids are seeing the camera as another natural tool for expression. So what is exciting to me isn’t so much the publishing of photobooks for children, but children making their own photobooks. My kids and I have produced two and they have been so much fun to make. They will also be something they’ll never forget.”
Fact versus fiction
Boot’s comments hit on a central divide in children’s photography books between those – like Steichen’s The First Picture Book – that use photography to show real objects in an encyclopaedic manner, and those that use staged photography to create something fictional. A more encyclopaedic approach is the norm when it comes to children’s books that use photography, compared with those that are illustrated, and they tend to use stock imagery, rarely putting the photographs centre stage. Photobooks using staged images by a single artist to create, or accompany, a narrative have traditionally been much less common.
For Freytag that’s because many publishers see fictional photobooks as a risk, something she discovered when she approached publishers with Wild Child. “The scope for children’s fictional imagery is so vast – the sky is the limit – and you can let your imagination run wild,” she explains. “I think most publishers like to play safe; they mainly use photography for fact-based books and more traditional illustrations for fiction or picture books.
“This is something I’m trying to change. Because my style of photography is very illustrational, I’m neither seen as a photographer nor an illustrator, so some publishers don’t like to take a risk with me. Walker Books were very bold taking on my idea for Wild Child, but we pulled it off.”
For Soth, this tension between fact and fiction is inherent in photography because of its indexical link with the world, and that makes it a tricky medium for children’s picture books because they depend on letting kid’s imaginations wander. “Children’s photography books work better when they are fiction-based, but the photos tend to work better in fact-based books,” he says. “This is the crux of the problem – photographs are more closely tied to fact than illustration. This is why we don’t see many contemporary photographically illustrated books, and this is why photo comic books have died off too.”
Reality principle
In fact, fictional books are bucking the historical trend, with nearly all those mentioned coming out this year choosing constructed narratives. For Borland, this shift, like the growth of children’s photobooks in general, is also down to kids’ newly sophisticated relationship with images and image-making. “In the 1950s and 60s, publications such as Picture Post used the medium of photography to depict ordinary life, and some of the stranger aspects of life,” she says. “But now I think there is a great level of visual sophistication, among children in particular, so you can’t just present them with that. You couldn’t get away with that direct relationship – you’ve got to bring something new to it. It’s either got to be digitally tinkered with, or in some ways fabricated… You can’t make the photographs real in the banal sense, they have got to be almost surreal.”
Von Holleben agrees, but adds that for him this tension between fact and fantasy is an opportunity rather than a threat. His images are always intricately staged and often fool the viewer, but they are all shot “for real”, he says, and that allows him to play with the viewer.
“Because the pictures show reality, the kids relate differently to them,” he explains. “A two year old might not know the difference between photography and illustration, but a five year old knows what a photograph is, and takes it more seriously.
But von Holleben has noticed a certain hesitance towards children’s photobooks – something that he attributes to photography’s reality principle and adults’ romanticisation of childhood. “I think parents don’t want to expose their kids to reality, so they prefer illustration,” he says. “They have a romantic idea about keeping children cosy and safe, away from reality, which is difficult for photography to do. I think that’s why books such as The Red Balloon are popular now – because the images were taken 50 years ago, they become nostalgic, so that’s fine…”
This orthodoxy is something Mollison and Boot rejected with Where Children Sleep, which Boot published in 2010 and went on to become one of his best-selling books. A series of documentary images showing children and their bedrooms, it unflinchingly portrays abject poverty, as well as comfortable wealth and security, and yet sold out in its first and second edition before it even got to the bookshelves. “There are tough situations and hard issues in the book, but it felt wrong to gloss over them,” says Mollison. “I think children are pretty savvy and appreciate honesty.”
Narrative forms
Mollison and Boot say the secret to the book’s success was ensuring that it worked as a storybook as well as a series of images, and they enlisted the help of a primary school teacher to write each child’s life story. “This is a narrative book – it’s a book of 60 stories about the lives of different children and the issues they face,” says Boot. “Some of the stories are really moving, and some are funny. It gets children to think about issues like inequality, poverty and privilege, and what their lives might be like if they were born in different circumstances.”
Text is an important element in children’s photobooks, and something that photographers working in this area work hard to reconcile. Robinson and Hulin both wrote the narrative to their photobooks, for example, and they say that although they started out with the photography, they eventually realised they needed to finish the story and storyboard the images before they could complete the visuals. Borland worked with Lauren Child on her publications, and she says the acclaimed children’s author and illustrator was instrumental in art directing the images she was shooting. “In a picture book it is about the text having a direct link to the visuals and vice versa,” she says. “I don’t really see a distinction between them. The photography and text are interconnected – they both have to tell a story as well as support each other. We were very conscious of the text and how we were going to reflect it in the images.”
Iturbide eliminated text altogether in her book, Asor, leaving the images to carry the narrative alone, and von Holleben also opted to do without words in Kosmos. Interestingly, both these books are (or will be) published by Little Steidl, which is also putting out Gearon’s forthcoming title, an ostensibly traditional children’s book that actually takes an oblique approach to text and image.
“Tierney’s book works on the traditional ABC model, which is something I always said I would never do,” laughs Nina Holland, who heads up Little Steidl with Jerry Sohn. “But it’s so sophisticated I immediately said yes. She’s shot a collection of photographs that, for her, on a private level, work around alphabetical, alliterative phrases, not the obvious alphabetic connection. Nowhere in the book does it go through the letters of the alphabet, it’s just the pictures and the text, but each phrase plays off the imagery. It opens the question of why the phrase is associated with the image and opens a creative link between them.
“At Little Steidl, I’ve tried to avoid a relationship between visuals and language that subjugates the visual,” she continues. “I would like the viewer to enter into the books primarily through the visual, so most of my books do not have text. Pure visual works do not require the mediation of language. If I include text, I like it to be from a creative point of view and literary, not interpretation. I like it to increase the tension between the visual and the language, and that’s how I choose the books I work with.”
Most Little Steidl books are aimed at readers of all ages (Gearon’s is the first to be specifically targeted at children), but Holland says children often understand this image-based approach better than adults because they are actually the more sophisticated visual readers. Where adults often go to the text looking for an explanation of the images and vice versa, she says, children are “much more likely to discover on their own terms and negotiate the world through the visual”.
“Children are far more visually sensitive and sophisticated than most adults. They use books passionately. They look carefully, invest their imagination, and read a single book hundreds of times until it falls apart. This is our ideal reader, and we aim to make books that inspire this kind of devoted attention from adults as well,” she adds.
“Children are much more difficult to please than adults,” Gearon concurs. “For me, it’s more interesting to do a children’s book than a regular book.”
Economic factors
That’s probably just as well because, as both Borland and Hulin point out, making children’s photobooks can be a labour of love. Economically it can be hard to make them work because, while they cost just as much (if not more) to produce than adult photobooks, the grownups are often unwilling to spend more than about £15 on kid’s books. As Wegman puts it, that’s fine when the books are very successful, “but when they’re borderline it creates some problems”. And when, like adult photobooks, most are printed in editions of 4000 or less, it’s difficult to make the numbers add up financially.
Von Holleben and Holland also point out that adults tend to underestimate what children are capable of reading and enjoying and, as Hulin found out the hard way, that makes publishers conservative about what they’re willing to publish. Perhaps publishers are also wary of the sometimes chequered history of children’s photobooks, in which once-celebrated publications have fallen victim to changing social attitudes.
When The Lonely Doll was republished in 1998 by Houghton Mifflin, for example, a scene in which the heroine is spanked for being naughty proved controversial for contemporary audiences. Meanwhile, Show Me!’s frank depiction of child sexuality, plus the fact that it depicted nude children alongside nude adults, led to such protracted legal battles over censorship that its English-language publisher, St Martin’s Press, pulled it in 1982 on the grounds that it couldn’t afford to defend it any longer.
All these factors mean that children’s photobooks remain niche compared with other illustrated picture books, despite the recent upsurge of interest – but perhaps they won’t stay that way. As Boot found out, children’s photobooks can become commercial successes because they reach far beyond the usual restricted market for conventional photobooks. And as Robinson points out, this also makes them fun to do: “I found it really liberating to make a book that will be seen by people other than photographers and artists,” he says. “It made me much less precious.”
That’s not to say that their readers won’t become photographers and artists in future – both Borland and Hulin say they loved photobooks when they were children, and Boot says the “purity” of the Ladybird illustrated books he grew up with has informed his entire working life. For Holland, meanwhile, the idea that Little Steidl could help influence the next generation of visual artists is really its reason for being. “My daughter grew up in the studios of all the artists I was working with and she is now a visual artist, so I know what an impact it made on her to have that direct contact with art,” she says.
“But I thought, ‘What about those children who don’t have access to these kind of materials?’ All they have is this highly mediated, very kitsch stuff. I wanted to find a way to make the connection between contemporary artists and emerging artists of every age, and that was the idea behind Little Steidl.”
Over the past decade or so, interest in this little niche has picked up momentum, with well-established photographers such as Abelardo Morrell, Polly Borland, Graciela Iturbide and James Mollison producing books aimed at children, alongside their acclaimed art and documentary projects. Last year, Lorna Freytag published Wild Child with Walker Books, which went on to be longlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal for children’s illustration (the results of which are announced next month), while David Robinson created The Mushroom Picker, made with Violette Editions, whose previous books include titles by French artists Sophie Calle and Louise Bourgeois.
From Graciela Iturbide's Asor, published by Little Steidl in 2010. Image © Graciela Iturbide / Magnum Photos.
And this year, even more books for children are in the pipeline. Berlin-based photographer Jan von Holleben is publishing Kosmos, a boxset of books aimed at all ages, produced by Little Steidl, plus he’s made an educational photobook about puberty for older kids, published by Gabriel Verlag. Freytag is coming out with a pop-up edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with Carlton Books later this month, followed by My Humongous Hamster in April, by Piccadilly Press, along with an interactive eBook book called Sock Monster, which is due this summer. Meanwhile, Rachel Hulin will soon publish Flying Henry with powerHouse Books, while Tierney Gearon has created an alternative ABC photobook with Little Steidl, due in autumn, and Wegman is publishing his first new children’s book for nine years.Little Steidl, an imprint of Steidl that specialises in artists’ books aimed at readers of all ages, is reintroducing itself this autumn as a standalone publisher, having taken over one of its parent company’s printing presses. In addition, curators Susan Bright and Hedy van Erp are working on a photography book for teenagers which they hope to publish in the next year or two.
From Tierney Gearon's forthcoming book for Little Steidl, in which images play off alliterative phrases sequenced using the alphabet. Image © Tierney Gearon.
For Bright, the sheer number of images that children and young adults now encounter every day means that thoughtful publications dealing with visual literacy are desperately needed. Chris Boot, who ran his own publishing company until recently, before taking up the role of executive director of the Aperture Foundation in New York, follows a similar line of argument, adding that cheap cameras and the advent of smartphones mean children are taking many more photographs than ever before. “In a world where kids make photographs all the time, and speak the language of photography in a more sophisticated way than any prior generation, photobooks for kids seem kind of obvious,” he says. “Not necessarily art books, but picture books about what the world is like, where the pictures are photographs.”Alec Soth, who started collecting children’s photography books a couple of years ago, agrees. He also believes the future may be in photobooks created by children for children, having already made a couple with his son and daughter Carmen and Gus – The Brighton Bunny Boy and Bunny Boy Goes to Rome – published under his own imprint, Little Brown Mushroom. “Everything is changing,” he comments. “With smartphones, kids are seeing the camera as another natural tool for expression. So what is exciting to me isn’t so much the publishing of photobooks for children, but children making their own photobooks. My kids and I have produced two and they have been so much fun to make. They will also be something they’ll never forget.”
Fact versus fiction
Boot’s comments hit on a central divide in children’s photography books between those – like Steichen’s The First Picture Book – that use photography to show real objects in an encyclopaedic manner, and those that use staged photography to create something fictional. A more encyclopaedic approach is the norm when it comes to children’s books that use photography, compared with those that are illustrated, and they tend to use stock imagery, rarely putting the photographs centre stage. Photobooks using staged images by a single artist to create, or accompany, a narrative have traditionally been much less common.
For Freytag that’s because many publishers see fictional photobooks as a risk, something she discovered when she approached publishers with Wild Child. “The scope for children’s fictional imagery is so vast – the sky is the limit – and you can let your imagination run wild,” she explains. “I think most publishers like to play safe; they mainly use photography for fact-based books and more traditional illustrations for fiction or picture books.
“This is something I’m trying to change. Because my style of photography is very illustrational, I’m neither seen as a photographer nor an illustrator, so some publishers don’t like to take a risk with me. Walker Books were very bold taking on my idea for Wild Child, but we pulled it off.”
For Soth, this tension between fact and fiction is inherent in photography because of its indexical link with the world, and that makes it a tricky medium for children’s picture books because they depend on letting kid’s imaginations wander. “Children’s photography books work better when they are fiction-based, but the photos tend to work better in fact-based books,” he says. “This is the crux of the problem – photographs are more closely tied to fact than illustration. This is why we don’t see many contemporary photographically illustrated books, and this is why photo comic books have died off too.”
Dare Wright's 1957 classic, The Lonely Doll, remains hugely influential. Reprinted with the permission of Dare Wright Media, LLC. All rights reserved.
He says that The Lonely Doll series is “a classic of the genre” because it uses photographs of dolls; human stand-ins that are less connected to reality, the shots of them therefore “invite children to wander into an imaginary world with their own dolls”. In more recent times, Borland’s books were inspired by Wright’s approach, using dolls and toys to drive their narratives, while others have used anything from funghi (The Mushroom Picker) to overt digital manipulation (Freytag) to create their fictions.Reality principle
In fact, fictional books are bucking the historical trend, with nearly all those mentioned coming out this year choosing constructed narratives. For Borland, this shift, like the growth of children’s photobooks in general, is also down to kids’ newly sophisticated relationship with images and image-making. “In the 1950s and 60s, publications such as Picture Post used the medium of photography to depict ordinary life, and some of the stranger aspects of life,” she says. “But now I think there is a great level of visual sophistication, among children in particular, so you can’t just present them with that. You couldn’t get away with that direct relationship – you’ve got to bring something new to it. It’s either got to be digitally tinkered with, or in some ways fabricated… You can’t make the photographs real in the banal sense, they have got to be almost surreal.”
Von Holleben agrees, but adds that for him this tension between fact and fantasy is an opportunity rather than a threat. His images are always intricately staged and often fool the viewer, but they are all shot “for real”, he says, and that allows him to play with the viewer.
“Because the pictures show reality, the kids relate differently to them,” he explains. “A two year old might not know the difference between photography and illustration, but a five year old knows what a photograph is, and takes it more seriously.
From the series Dreams of Flying Revisited. Image © Jan von Holleben.
“The Dreams of Flying project [published in two books, in 2006 and 2008] was based on the idea of kids lying on the floor [to create playful tableaux], changing to another reality. It’s playing with that aspect of photography – the images are always real, but they don’t look it. When kids read Kosmos they will discover how the image is made, and that will help them reflect on the reality of the photograph. It’s like a little game.”But von Holleben has noticed a certain hesitance towards children’s photobooks – something that he attributes to photography’s reality principle and adults’ romanticisation of childhood. “I think parents don’t want to expose their kids to reality, so they prefer illustration,” he says. “They have a romantic idea about keeping children cosy and safe, away from reality, which is difficult for photography to do. I think that’s why books such as The Red Balloon are popular now – because the images were taken 50 years ago, they become nostalgic, so that’s fine…”
This orthodoxy is something Mollison and Boot rejected with Where Children Sleep, which Boot published in 2010 and went on to become one of his best-selling books. A series of documentary images showing children and their bedrooms, it unflinchingly portrays abject poverty, as well as comfortable wealth and security, and yet sold out in its first and second edition before it even got to the bookshelves. “There are tough situations and hard issues in the book, but it felt wrong to gloss over them,” says Mollison. “I think children are pretty savvy and appreciate honesty.”
Narrative forms
Mollison and Boot say the secret to the book’s success was ensuring that it worked as a storybook as well as a series of images, and they enlisted the help of a primary school teacher to write each child’s life story. “This is a narrative book – it’s a book of 60 stories about the lives of different children and the issues they face,” says Boot. “Some of the stories are really moving, and some are funny. It gets children to think about issues like inequality, poverty and privilege, and what their lives might be like if they were born in different circumstances.”
Text is an important element in children’s photobooks, and something that photographers working in this area work hard to reconcile. Robinson and Hulin both wrote the narrative to their photobooks, for example, and they say that although they started out with the photography, they eventually realised they needed to finish the story and storyboard the images before they could complete the visuals. Borland worked with Lauren Child on her publications, and she says the acclaimed children’s author and illustrator was instrumental in art directing the images she was shooting. “In a picture book it is about the text having a direct link to the visuals and vice versa,” she says. “I don’t really see a distinction between them. The photography and text are interconnected – they both have to tell a story as well as support each other. We were very conscious of the text and how we were going to reflect it in the images.”
James Mollison's Where Children Sleep, put out by Chris Boot in 2010, was one of the publisher's best-selling books.
Soth, for his part, says he got into collecting children’s photobooks because he was looking for new models of combining text and images, and realised that “the children’s book is one of the most eloquent ways to put them together”. He adds: “Most adult photography books separate text and image – you often have an essay by a curator at the front or the back of the book, and the images in between. With children’s photobooks, the text and images are woven together.” He argues that most successful children’s books use illustration rather than photography, and says some photographers remain suspicious of text, fearful that using it drives their images into a secondary, supporting role.Iturbide eliminated text altogether in her book, Asor, leaving the images to carry the narrative alone, and von Holleben also opted to do without words in Kosmos. Interestingly, both these books are (or will be) published by Little Steidl, which is also putting out Gearon’s forthcoming title, an ostensibly traditional children’s book that actually takes an oblique approach to text and image.
“Tierney’s book works on the traditional ABC model, which is something I always said I would never do,” laughs Nina Holland, who heads up Little Steidl with Jerry Sohn. “But it’s so sophisticated I immediately said yes. She’s shot a collection of photographs that, for her, on a private level, work around alphabetical, alliterative phrases, not the obvious alphabetic connection. Nowhere in the book does it go through the letters of the alphabet, it’s just the pictures and the text, but each phrase plays off the imagery. It opens the question of why the phrase is associated with the image and opens a creative link between them.
“At Little Steidl, I’ve tried to avoid a relationship between visuals and language that subjugates the visual,” she continues. “I would like the viewer to enter into the books primarily through the visual, so most of my books do not have text. Pure visual works do not require the mediation of language. If I include text, I like it to be from a creative point of view and literary, not interpretation. I like it to increase the tension between the visual and the language, and that’s how I choose the books I work with.”
Most Little Steidl books are aimed at readers of all ages (Gearon’s is the first to be specifically targeted at children), but Holland says children often understand this image-based approach better than adults because they are actually the more sophisticated visual readers. Where adults often go to the text looking for an explanation of the images and vice versa, she says, children are “much more likely to discover on their own terms and negotiate the world through the visual”.
“Children are far more visually sensitive and sophisticated than most adults. They use books passionately. They look carefully, invest their imagination, and read a single book hundreds of times until it falls apart. This is our ideal reader, and we aim to make books that inspire this kind of devoted attention from adults as well,” she adds.
“Children are much more difficult to please than adults,” Gearon concurs. “For me, it’s more interesting to do a children’s book than a regular book.”
Economic factors
That’s probably just as well because, as both Borland and Hulin point out, making children’s photobooks can be a labour of love. Economically it can be hard to make them work because, while they cost just as much (if not more) to produce than adult photobooks, the grownups are often unwilling to spend more than about £15 on kid’s books. As Wegman puts it, that’s fine when the books are very successful, “but when they’re borderline it creates some problems”. And when, like adult photobooks, most are printed in editions of 4000 or less, it’s difficult to make the numbers add up financially.
Von Holleben and Holland also point out that adults tend to underestimate what children are capable of reading and enjoying and, as Hulin found out the hard way, that makes publishers conservative about what they’re willing to publish. Perhaps publishers are also wary of the sometimes chequered history of children’s photobooks, in which once-celebrated publications have fallen victim to changing social attitudes.
When The Lonely Doll was republished in 1998 by Houghton Mifflin, for example, a scene in which the heroine is spanked for being naughty proved controversial for contemporary audiences. Meanwhile, Show Me!’s frank depiction of child sexuality, plus the fact that it depicted nude children alongside nude adults, led to such protracted legal battles over censorship that its English-language publisher, St Martin’s Press, pulled it in 1982 on the grounds that it couldn’t afford to defend it any longer.
All these factors mean that children’s photobooks remain niche compared with other illustrated picture books, despite the recent upsurge of interest – but perhaps they won’t stay that way. As Boot found out, children’s photobooks can become commercial successes because they reach far beyond the usual restricted market for conventional photobooks. And as Robinson points out, this also makes them fun to do: “I found it really liberating to make a book that will be seen by people other than photographers and artists,” he says. “It made me much less precious.”
That’s not to say that their readers won’t become photographers and artists in future – both Borland and Hulin say they loved photobooks when they were children, and Boot says the “purity” of the Ladybird illustrated books he grew up with has informed his entire working life. For Holland, meanwhile, the idea that Little Steidl could help influence the next generation of visual artists is really its reason for being. “My daughter grew up in the studios of all the artists I was working with and she is now a visual artist, so I know what an impact it made on her to have that direct contact with art,” she says.
“But I thought, ‘What about those children who don’t have access to these kind of materials?’ All they have is this highly mediated, very kitsch stuff. I wanted to find a way to make the connection between contemporary artists and emerging artists of every age, and that was the idea behind Little Steidl.”
Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/feature/2238509/photobooks-for-children-are-you-sitting-comfortably#ixzz2YdNlB5UD
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