Picture Play
A new (to me!) Hero of Noticing
The ever-surprising and always impressive Virginia Postrel recently passed along this post from the newsletter Looking at Picture Books, and it’s really something!
Looking at Picture Books is quite interesting in general: It’s all about deep dives into, well, picture books, by way of conversational critiques from children’s book authors Jon Klassen and Mac Barnett. The specific subject of the post that Virginia flagged is the work of Tana Hoban, a photographer who among other things created a bunch of very cool visual books that you could say are designed for children but seem to me to be more fundamentally designed for seeing, at any age.
Via Looking at Picture Books, here’s Hoban on a 1975 chat show. It starts out a little awkward but kinda finds its footing. This evidently pre-dates the books I’m talking about but it gives a sense of Hoban’s vibe. Also on the show is her editor, who at one point is randomly grilled by another guest about her career path, and stresses the importance of knowing how to type. But I digress.
The post analyzes several of Hoban’s books, and I recommend checking the whole thing if you can. But I’ll just focus on a couple of Klassen and Barnett’s examples.
Color is always a fun and accessible subject (certainly on TAoN), and Hoban’s take on the subject is very clever. The cover and title page of Is It Red? Is It Yellow? Is It Blue? presents dots of color and just a few words that signal what the game is. The rest of the book is wordless — a series of photographs, each with a set of colored dots below it that prompts the kid (or post-kid) reading to find those colors in the image.
Zeroing in on one example (above) Barnett observes:
The canopy, in the sun, is yellow, but where it’s in the shade, it’s orange. So the same object is two different colors, depending on how the light is hitting it. That’s a pretty sophisticated, profound truth about color!
It’s true: Hoban does an amazing job of making her viewer truly see differently with a minimum of fanfare. Another example I enjoyed:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Art of Noticing to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.