"The Simple little picture book": private theater to postmodern experience.

A picture book is a text, illustrations, total design; an item of manufacture and a commercial product; a social, cultural, historical document; and, foremost, an experience for a child.... On its own terms the possibilities are endless.

--Barbara Bader(1)

This article explores the unique crux between visual, oral, and textual storytelling occupied by the powerful art of the picture book. It addresses the misconception that visual images stifle the work of the imagination by fixing a text. Instead, the picture book is an ideal forum of dialogue for difficult or sensitive subjects, where words and pictures offer two different interpretations of the story. The article concludes by positing the possibility of the picture book as a medium of postmodernism which demands active reader participation, analysis, performance, and re-creation--continually subverting the relationship between omniscient-authorial adult and passive child recipient.

What is a picture book?

Lay responses to this question will often refer to the ubiquitous A for Apple/B for Bear alphabet book, or that indestructible object known as a toy or board book, containing a myriad assortments of flaps, holes, and pop-ups, and used, most commonly, as a toddler's teething tome. These examples are picture books. But so are Babette Cole's Mommy Laid an Egg (2) and Michael Rosen's Sad Book, (3) which tackle, respectively, the subjects of sex and death. Oh, The Places You'll Go! by Dr. Seuss (4) is also a picture book--one that is customarily purchased by adults for adults, particularly as a going-away gift prior to a long journey. There are picture books on everything from Hiroshima to homosexuality; picture books that are lyrical, abstract, philosophical, surrealistic; picture books that are enjoyed by children and adults alike.

The picture book is a rich and versatile art form which has surpassed all prevailing notions of the medium. It is no longer exclusively peopled by a cast of adorably furry characters--including the ever-present rotund baby bear and mischievous kitten--who learn, through the threat of a fearsome foe, to obey their mothers. In other words, it no longer houses stories stripped down to the sum of their pedagogical aims: the technical development of reading skills, coupled with the didactic 'message' or 'moral' from the omniscient adult author to the tabula rasa that is the passive child addressee. The good picture book challenges and subverts this relationship on every page. This article will explore the unique features of the picture book that put this process into play.

Words and Pictures: Multiplying Readings