Photographers Make Picture Books, and Why Not?

Writing in 1931 in Publishers Weekly, the New York Public Library’s Helen Hammett Owen was of two minds as she noted a new trend for “photographic picture books.” While praising the best examples she had seen, Owen questioned the sense and wisdom of the effort. Photographs, she argued, as images pulled from the world of fact, could do far less to fire the imagination of an impressionable young child than illustrations rendered in traditional media like line or watercolor. “Let children have these books,” she grandly allowed, “but give them also ‘Mother Goose’ and ‘Aesop’ and ‘Beatrix Potter’ to stimulate their imagination and sense of color. After all there is more to life than milk and spinach even for the two-year-old.”

Horn Book co-founders Bertha E. Mahony and Elinor Whitney chimed in a few years later to second Owen’s point: “However fine the pictures, the photographic picture books have less space for the workings of a child’s fancy and are sooner exhausted than imaginative pictures.” Similar doubts would persist for decades afterward, even as accomplished photographers from the realms of fine art, advertising, and journalism continued to discover the picture book as fertile ground for their creativity.

The book that launched the 1930s trend featured black-and-white photographs of twenty-four household objects a two-year-old might be expected to recognize. The images were the work of Edward Steichen, one of America’s foremost photographers. The idea for The First Picture Book had come from Mary Steichen Martin, the photographer’s daughter. Martin was an actor and mother at the time and a friend of the visionary director of the nursery school at the progressive Bureau of Educational Experiments in Greenwich Village (later the Bank Street School for Children). She believed passionately in Harriet M. Johnson’s approach to early education as a guided exploration of the child’s immediate or “here and now” world, with the children themselves often encouraged to take the lead. Steichen’s photographs aligned well with the school’s program by presenting toddlers with chances to grasp the connection between familiar objects and their images in a book, the pages of which had been left text-free as a prompt to conversation. The following year, Steichen’s photos for The Second Picture Book, a sequel aimed at three-year-olds, depicted children of that age putting their budding motor skills to use in encounters with a bouncing ball, a block set, and even a small ladder. Plans for additional sequels pegged to more advanced developmental stages fell victim to Depression-era economics. 

That setback notwithstanding, interest in photographically illustrated children’s books continued to grow. Another landmark publication was Lewis W. Hine’s Men at Work of 1932, which documented the recent construction of the Empire State Building. Hine’s photographs, which the Empire State Corporation had commissioned from him, celebrated the dignity and heroism of the laborers, or “sky boys,” who performed skilled daredevil tasks hundreds of feet above the streets of Manhattan. In telling their story for young readers, Hine, a former teacher at New York’s progressive Ethical Culture School, had in effect adapted Bank Street’s Here and Now idea to the developmental level of grade-schoolers, whose circle of awareness was assumed to extend to the world at large and whose sense of self was increasingly tied to the very qualities that Hine’s subjects epitomized: physical agility and strength, task-based competence, and knowledge of the way things worked. 

For those who embraced the new insights of child psychology as a powerful tool for re-imagining the picture book, the uniquely realistic nature of photographs was not the liability some librarians believed, but a decided strength. Conversely, not all photographs were in fact wedded to literal reality to the extent that Owen and her fellow critics claimed. A photo might just as well be staged for the camera to depict scenes as fanciful as any found in books with more traditional illustrations. As historian Mus White has documented in her bibliography From the Mundane to the Magical, some of the earliest photographically illustrated children’s books of note belonged to this latter category. White dates the very first photographic children’s book to 1854, less than twenty years after the medium’s invention, and identifies nearly 150 other such books published for young people before 1901. During those feverishly experimental years, White reports, the genre of the photographically illustrated children’s book “developed parallel with the artistic photograph” as a whole.

As Victorian-era critics debated whether images made with the click of a shutter merited consideration as Art, early art photographers did their best to tip the argument in their favor. Charles Dodgson, the Oxford mathematician and amateur photographer better known to the world as Lewis Carroll, was among those who sometimes hired a colorist to hand-tint his portraits of children and famous friends so as to give them a more painterly appearance. Dodgson’s contemporary, Henry Peach Robinson, posed his subjects in costume and arranged them, like characters in a play, in meticulously stage-crafted scenes that incorporated historical or literary references. In 1858, Robinson produced a series of four photographs illustrating “Little Red Riding Hood,” although not for book publication. Mary A.N. Grey Bartlett’s Mother Goose of ‘93, Leigh Gross Day’s In Shadow-Land, and Caro Senour’s Master St. Elmo: The Autobiography of a Celebrated Dog, were all children’s books conceived in the same spirit of “photo theater.” By the turn of the last century, books like theirs had become a popular category within the burgeoning juvenile holiday gift market, alongside the spectacular popup books of Lothar Meggendorfer and classic editions illustrated by Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, N. C. Wyeth, Ivan Bilibin, and others. 

For muchof the 1800s, the technology for printing a photograph alongside lines of text on a page remained out a practical reach for most publishers. Mathew Brady’s studio portraits of Lincoln had to be converted into wood-engraved line art for reproduction in Harper’s Weekly or the New-York Tribune. Mary A.N. Grey Bartlett printed her charmingly staged photographs for Mother Goose of ‘93 by the tonally rich gravure process on separate sheets of tissue paper, which were then individually “tipped in” (pasted in place) by hand in every copy of the impressive book’s sturdier pages. A major turning point came with the perfection, by 1900, of the halftone printing process, which broke down a photographic image into a grid of dots that could be printed simultaneously with blocks of type in a single press run in substantial quantities. From then onward, photographic illustration for children’s books was seen by publishers as an affordable option. 

Among the other key developments that spurred the genre’s acceptance were the phenomenal popularity of photo magazines led by Life and Look, which launched in 1936 and 1937 respectively and for decades afterward put photographic storytelling front and center for millions of Americans; the post-World War II baby boom, which fueled a massive expansion of children’s book publishing in the U.S., Europe, and Japan and an insatiable demand for novelty and innovation in books; increased interest in international co-editions of children’s books, a trend fostered by the establishment of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in 1964; and the advent during the 1980s of affordable, high-quality color printing for book illustration. By the 1950s, three distinct categories of the photographically illustrated children’s book had begun to come into focus, each one building on earlier experiments. The plan for CLICK!, for which ninety-seven photographic prints by 17 artists and a selection 23 rare books have been brought together, is based on this three-pronged pattern. 

Real Worlds presents work by documentary photographers, for whom Lewis W. Hine’s Men and Work was an important precedent: Ylla’s animal portraits, Peter Buckley’s life histories of children in various parts of the world, and more recent work by George Ancona, Susan Kuklin, Charles R. Smith, Jr., and Ken Robbins, all of whom had roots in photo journalism, as well as the contemporary Chinese photographer Peng Yi. The photos from Cesare of Italy by Buckley, an American photographer, have an interesting relationship to those on display in the Swedish book Elle Kari by Elly Jannes and photographer Anna Riwkin-Brick. Both books were the inaugural volumes of popular post-war series published with the idealistic goal of fostering world peace by introducing young people to their peers across the globe. No other illustration medium could have made the authors’ case more persuasively.

Concept Books: The Alphabet and Other Good Ideas encompasses the tradition of the “concept book,” for which The First Picture Book by Edward Steichen and his daughter laid the groundwork. Among the special books on view in this group is the French photographer Robert Doisneau’s exuberant introduction to the numbers and concept of counting out, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Represented by photographic prints is work by Tana Hoban, Walter Wick, Saxton Freymann, and Shelley Rotner.

Hoban was a well-regarded advertising and portrait photographer when she happened upon an essay in the New York Times that changed her creative life. The piece described an inspired teacher’s efforts to persuade jaded grade-school children to look more thoughtfully at their surroundings—and the dynamic city in which they lived. Each child was given a simple hand-held video camera to take along on their group neighborhood walks and told to film whatever interested them. The experience proved transformative. Hoban reasoned that a photographically illustrated picture book that framed the act of looking as a kind of treasure hunt or quest might have the same power to engage children’s minds. The success of her books helped to jump-start an entire subgenre of picture books designed as play-based visual learning experiences.

Photo Theater comprises books for which the camera has been utilized to toy with reality rather than mirror it back. As we have seen, the temptation to do so was felt almost from photography’s earliest beginnings. Photographs of this kind in Click! include work by Marcel Imsand, George Ancona, William Wegman, Abelardo Morell, Nina Crews, Mo Willems, and Roger Mello. Among the showcased books in this group are the best-selling The Lonely Doll and its seventh sequel Edith and Little Bear Lend a Hand, both by mid-century New York model and actor turned photographer Dare Wright. Wright had a special knack for tapping into the potential of staged photography—with its unsettlingly ambiguous mix of the artificial and real—to subtly stir and probe raw childhood emotions. Although at first glance a tale of innocent child’s play, The Lonely Doll edges steadily deeper into darker territory as Edith, the title character, ventures simultaneously out into the world and into a maelstrom of new-found feelings ranging from the fear of abandonment to the desire for forbidden pleasures. 

More recently, William Wegman, master of the artful put-on, brought a deadpan sense of fun to fairy-tale retellings featuring posed photographs of bewigged and costumed Weimaraner dogs. Behind the archness of Wegman’s impertinent take on the “classics” lurked just the right dose of strangeness to nudge readers into a genuinely Grimm state of mind. Another innovative foray into photo theater, Handtalk Birthday—by George Ancona in collaboration with author-stage-director Remy Charlip and actor Mary Beth Miller of the National Theatre of the Deaf—staged a slapstick pantomime skit of Chaplinesque verve for readers to enjoy whether or not they also chose to learn the basics of American Sign Language as demonstrated within its illustrations. 

Digital scanning technology and computer graphics software like Photoshop and Indesign have opened up new possibilities for photographic illustration. While practiced photographers have always exercised considerable control over their work and employed techniques such as collage and photomontage for manipulating an image, the ease with which a photograph can be altered has never been greater. Elements of drawing, painting, and photography can be readily combined within a single image as in Christopher Myers’s Black Cat and Mo Willems’s Knuffle Bunny series, where digitally altered black-and-white background photographs of Brooklyn city streets share the stage with scribbly-scrawly color drawings of the story’s characters. Through this computer-orchestrated blending of media, we are given the enticing sensation of glimpsing a world that exists nowhere except in the pages of a book. Whether high tech or low, there are all sorts of ways to catapult us as readers into that other world. When a strong, clear vision is at work behind the camera lens, photographs are among them.