SNAP! CLICK! clacked the Shutter. POP! snapped the Flash. It was 1839. Photography was out of the barn. And now, as the Dish ran away with the Spoon, the act could be caught on film. Thus began the history of photo-illustrated books for children.............. |
Photography in children’s books has a lineage as long as photography itself. If literature is an infinite ocean and children’s literature a smaller sea, you will find the petite niche of photo-illustrated picturebooks to be a thirst-quenching oasis. Photography in picturebooks may be limited in number but is limitless in its range of formats, imagination, styles, techniques, content, and discourse. The images discovered between two mundane paperboards, carries us across continents into all imagined worlds, clarifying, mystifying, and entertaining the visual reader. FLASHPOP.xyz focuses on a century of international photographers and their photo-illustrated picturebooks for children. Jane Wattenberg San Francisco “Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern.” —Susan Sontag, 1973 |