New Media

All right, so maybe it's because I'm trying to finish up a book chapter about nineteenth-century photography, (or because I just discovered the amazing scariness of video-conferencing via iSight?), but I'm kind of consumed with thinking about photographic illustration these days. This has coincided nicely with OlderKid's and my discovery of Nina Crews' excellent (and brand new) picture book Below. It's easily compared with Traction Man is Here!, which I have previously praised, but they're actually pretty different (or as different as two books told from the point of view of a boy and his inanimate plaything could be).

I'm not automatically drawn to books that mix media like this; for example, Mo Willem's Knuffle Bunny seemed cute to me but not necessarily earth-shaking. Plus OlderKid showed no interest in it, for whatever reason. But he loves Below, and YoungerKid has also granted it the highly coveted drool-covered fingertip seal of approval. Part of it is surely that it's interesting to look at photographs of a boy about OlderKid's age doing exactly the same things that OlderKid likes to do: playing with trucks and little toy people and dropping them in various inaccesible places, such as, in this case, into a hole in the staircase. But Crews manages to make the book tap into the metaphorical terrors inherent in the space beneath the stairs, and without ever being heavy-handed about it, capture real fears of abandonment and loss more effectively than Willem's Trixie and her lost blanket. Plus, it's a biracial family! Not engaged in some kind of folkloric myth activity!

Photographs don't always make the best illustrations, but I've found that a lot of times their aura of realism and visual truth speaks especially to Older and YoungerKid, who is also a devotee of the DK board books. Ironically this is exactly what I'm railing against in the book chapter I'm writing, but maybe it's a little early to introduce Sontag into the mix.