Pony kids (original) (raw)

Introduction Photography in Children's Literature (with Elina Druker)

Photography in Children's Literature. Edited by Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2023

Previous research on photography and children's literature Within photography research, the genre of photographic picturebooks has been marginalized and usually omitted altogether. The two-volume handbook by Martin Parr and Georges Badger (2004, 2006) that provides an extensive overview of the history of photographic book illustration from the nineteenth century until the present, hardly mentions any photographic books for children. The same applies to The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century (2001) by Andrew Roth. When a photobook for children is included in these kinds of overviews, it is only because the photographers in question have made a name for themselves on the international art scene, such as Edward Steichen who created the iconic photos of the influential The First Picture Book: Everyday Things for Babies (1930). Similarly, studies on the theory of photography and the employment of cutting-edge techniques in photography and photobooks disregard the considerable corpus of photographic picturebooks for children made by avant-garde artists, despite the fact that several artists, such as El Lissitzky, Bruno Munari, and Emmanuel Sougez, created photobooks for children that have been showcased in exhibitions all over the world and are rare collectibles today (Lavie 2009b; Priem 2015). Academics working in literary studies have been particularly interested in the intricate relationship between text and photographs in photobooks (Weisstein 1978; Brunet 2009), or the impact of photography on literary narration (Beckman & Weisberg 2013). Researchers in the realms of art history and picture theory, for their part, have studied photography as an art form (Campany 2003, 2008; Caraffa 2009) or discussed how photography has impacted book design by emphasizing the theoretical concepts of montage and collage (Dobbe 2006, 2010; Stiegler 2009). However, all these studies exclude photographic books for children. Even within children's literature studies, research into photographic books for children has been underdeveloped. While Franz Kerka (1966) claims that there are hardly any photobooks for children, the extensive bibliography by Mus White (1999) shows that the opposite is true: the genre of photographic books entered the international book market already during the late 19th century. While photobooks for children are often cursorily presented in general studies and handbooks of children's literature (Hürlimann 1968; Künnemann 1979; Staiger 2016), there have been only a few articles or studies on the history of the photobook for children, for example by

The Photo Book -Objects of Desire

Membrana, 2018

This essay examines the visual cultural meaning behind a series of photographic images that have been transformed through censorship in Egypt. The censored book images were collected in Cairo’s bookstores between 2012 and 2014, and the original images had been doctored to conceal the human body.

"Portraits and Albums"

Treasures of the Aga Khan Museum, Sabanci Museum, Istanbul, 2010-11, 2010

Please note that the essay was commissioned at two weeks' notice (!), and the entries are not by me, but drawn from the Aga Khan databases. Nevertheless, I am grateful that I was given an opportunity to write about issues I have long been researching.

The Artist's Book and Photography (1979)

What kind of relationship can there exist between photographsreproductions of the « real », themselves infinitely reproducible -and a particular viewing context, that of the artist's book ? With this in mind, it would seem useful to take a close look at one example chosen for its analytical approach to the médium. Cover to Cover by Michael Snow 1 is thus a self-reflexive study of its own means presented in the form of a long photographie séquence.

The Image Book

Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media

Drawing inspiration from Denis de Rougemont’s 1936 text Penser avec les mains, Jean-Luc Godard’s most recent film brings together what the Swiss philosopher calls “penser engagé” with his own unique kind of “cinéma engagé.” The Image Book (Le Livre d’image, 2018) starts with three image-gestures that punctuate the film: the cropped close-up of the right hand of Leonardo da Vinci’s St. John The Baptist, French illustrator Joseph Pinchon’s drawing of Bécassine with her upwards pointing left hand, and the hands of the filmmaker joining together spools of film at a Steenbeck editing table. Like many other “late” Godard films, The Image Book is a multilayered assemblage of quotations, sounds, music, art and cinematic references. Yet, unlike some of its predecessors, this film questions the monolithic (Occidental) way of seeing the world, including Godard’s younger self. Combining citations from films, works of art and philosophical texts from the Maghreb and the Middle East, the film off...