Picture It
Encouraging child-like wonder — in children. Plus The Heard
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Back in November I wrote (twice) about the inspiring picture books of Tana Hoban — definitely a Hero of Noticing. Today I have a little more background (and inspiration) to share.
An exhibition called “CLICK! Photographers Make Picture Books,” is now up at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, MA, through June 71. Its curator, Leonard S. Marcus, has published an article sketching a history of photo-illustrated picture books for children. It notes Hoban’s work, and her guiding project of encouraging children to engage with their surroundings.
It also offers a couple of key precedents and influences — an early picture book featuring images from the celebrated photographer Edward Steichen, and a tech-forward educational project from the late 1960s that let kids themselves to make the images.
To start with the latter: a young New York educator named Robie Heilbrun “was dismayed at the children’s lack of curiosity about the vibrant city in which they lived,” Marcus writes, so she “arranged to give them easy-to-operate Super 8 cameras and invited them to film whatever most interested them during group walks through their neighborhoods.” (This was in the form of field trips with Harris and other adults; they weren’t just wandering around unsupervised!)
The result is a very idiosyncratic short documentary, “A Child’s Eye View.”
A 1968 New York Times article described the project:
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