Why I Love Picture Books

The keenest pleasure of reading a picture book is in the conversation. Because that’s what a picture book is – a conversation. In a picture book, text and images jointly offer up ideas, broad and inspirational enough to necessitate the reader’s response. It’s a conversation that wouldn’t be complete, in fact could not be complete, without the reader’s involvement in bringing the text to life.

          Picture books convey meaning through the interplay of visual and written communication. The images within a picture book are complex iconic signs that describe or represent the ideas narrated by the conventional signs (the words). The linear narrative is suspenseful – it should demand the turning of the page. But the nonlinear image is aesthetically pleasing – it should slowly reveal its nuances of mood, character, story and emotion, and demand the reader stop to absorb its details at length. The process of decoding both complex iconic signs and conventional signs is a source of tension and pleasure for the reader. As the reader splits their attention from picture to words and back again, their understanding of the overall text is enriched.

The most important aspect of any picture book is its textual gaps: the space between the words and pictures big enough to necessitate imaginative leaps. There are gaps in the text, gaps in the illustrations and gaps between the way the text and the illustrations relate to one another. These gaps create possibilities – they are pauses in the conversation where the picture book waits for the reader to respond. Drawing from prior experience and knowledge, each reader brings an infinite number of possibilities to the way they decode this unique interaction between word and image.

Most of my favourite picture books make use of counterpoint, where the verbal text suggests one thing while the image works to contradict or deviate from the text’s meaning. The reader’s relationship with such a text is one of an active participant. As contrasting information is being presented, the reader is challenged to find the meaning of the text by analysing opposing meanings, playing one meaning off against another. In a picture book, the challenge is always going to be striking a balance between a reading of the images with a reading of the text. Counterpoint picture books provide unmet expectations, suspending one of the core functions of reading: predicting. There is immense enjoyment to be gained from unmet expectations, of being pulled-up short when our predictions are proven to be misguided. This kind of reading practice is vital for building critical literacy skills and for developing the ability to engage in resistant readings. Being an active participant in the meaning-making process, being able to read against the intentions of the text and being aware of the ways in which texts can be misleading, frees the reader from the general constraints of reading a culturally constructed object like a book.

Image and text do not have to contradict one another for a picture book to be sophisticated and rewarding; illustrations can be used to enhance the meaning suggested by the words. Enhancement works on the principle that the gaps in a verbal text can be amplified (but not fully explained) by visual language. Thus, images in picture books do not have to provide a symmetrical or literal interpretation of the written text, rather they can expand the meaning of the text, add nuance, provide a springboard for tangential thought, add emotion, and provide the text with more adjectives than words can provide. Often the written text, while evocative, can only function as an indication of the larger story. Because images can generally evoke a wider range of emotions, illustrations capture the mood of the text as well as provide a deep-level emotional narrative, which a preliterate or emerging reader may not be able to grasp from language alone. The combination of fragmentary, open-ended verbal text and deeply evocative visual text invites the reader to create their own narrative – and a key function of learning to read is exploring language, playing with meaning and attempting to create meaning from visual or verbal clues. Given the abundance of space between text and image, what the reader brings to the text is necessary to complete the experience.

While the best children’s books can be understood in simple terms they should not be simplistic, they should allow for more complex reading by more sophisticated readers as well as encourage more complex readers – children should reach up, not down. One thing I do feel very strongly though is the text and the illustration in a picture book should never say exactly the same thing – this for me is an unsuccessful picture book because there is no room for gaps, no room for conversation.

Faced with such a complex task of decoding abstract and fragmentary narratives, children will invariably make mistakes. As adults, we are often afraid of this, of letting children ‘fail’. But as Stanley Fish said: ‘the meaning of the text includes all of what a reader does as (he or she) moves through the reading process. This includes the misunderstandings and erroneous judgments a reader makes in the course of reading, since the wayward steps are part of the experience of the text and, therefore, part of its meaning.’ As any teacher, librarian or parent will tell you, there is no way to adequately predict the wonderfully weird, creative and imaginative ‘readings’ children will bring to a text, many times moving fully away from the intentions of the writer, illustrator and adult reader. What is encoded may not be what is decoded and this intellectual play is an important part of a child’s growing awareness of literature. Show a child a series of pictures and they will happily narrate the events; in fact preliterate readers often do this with picture books, ignoring the written text and voicing a verbal narrative of their own creation, revealing a growing (but limited) understanding of narrative structure and a (surprisingly sophisticated) ability to create stories from static pictures – this is another way a picture book encourages children to be an active participant in the picture book conversation. Children learn through play – it is the core principle of preschool and early primary education.

What is perhaps worth making a note of is the important role non-moving illustrations play in picture books. It is precisely because the pictures in a picture book are static that they are a springboard for imaginative play. Faced with well-constructed two-dimensional pictures, a child is motivated to think beyond the page – what went before, what comes after, what happens in the inbetween. Think of Where the Wild Things Are. The series of double spreads which depict the ‘wild rumpus’ of Max and the Wild Things are snapshots of the event, leaving room for the reader to fill in the blanks. Importantly, Sendak has enough confidence in his readers and his story to know that words are not needed to narrate this part of the story – the reader can, given the right amount of inspiration, hear and see and imagine the out-of-control revelry for themselves. And for those that walked away from Spike Jones’s film adaption with bitter disappointment, we know that what is imagined is infinitely more powerful than what can be physically created by moving images and sound. The way the child animates the images themselves (through fantasy or play-acting) makes them a truly active participant. In this sense, the pictures in a picture book position the child as the prime mover – how the text comes to life is in their hands or rather their imagination.

It is also vital that the picture book is an unchanging product to which a child can bring multiple interpretations. Through repeated readings, the child becomes familiar with the language, can find new ideas in the interplay of text and image and can bring their growing understanding of the world to a familiar text, enriching their understanding of it each time they return. Each time a child rereads an identical text they bring a new interpretation to it and move deeper and deeper into its potential meaning. This includes becoming increasingly familiar with new or difficult words. The language of picture books is often sophisticated, more so than chapter books, and children need to hear this sophisticated vocabulary in context as well as practice it (and make mistakes along the way). They need to sound out and attempt to use or contextualise new words. It is more rewarding and effective in the long term if a child is encouraged to problem-solve language acquisition this way.

However, due to the nature of picture books, meaning is conveyed through more than the interplay between text and image. Often, a child is exposed to a picture book through co-reading, through an adult reading the book to them. In the process of hearing a book read aloud, the child picks up on auditory clues – tone, pacing, pauses, etc. But it is not simply an auditory experience, the child is also able to read the adult’s facial expressions and their gestures. We can therefore add a fourth story being told, the one the child reads in the performance of the text, one that is no doubt determined by the kind of relationship they share with the ‘performer’. What is perhaps most interesting about this is how, in repeated readings, the child is exposed to multiple and ever changing ‘interpretations’ of the text depending upon the mood of the performer, who the performer is (teacher, father, mother, sister, etc.) and how the child is feeling themselves. They will invariably experience the story read to them by different adults and thus begin to question or at least notice the differences in performance. We can begin to see, perhaps, how the picture book reading experience is important for the child’s ability to decode human behaviour.

There are many reasons why I love picture books and why I see them as being invaluable to a child’s development. It always concerns me when I hear parents bragging about how their child has moved ‘beyond’ picture books and onto chapter books. Chapter books serve an important function; they offer the child their first independent reading experiences, giving them confidence and a sense of achievement. But because of their nature they need to be a great deal less sophisticated than a picture book. This is why I don’t believe children should be encouraged to put away picture books when they are ready to pick up chapter books. In fact, I’m not sure there is even a time to put away your picture books – the picture book conversation can be had at any age (at least I’m hoping so; if not, I don’t have an excuse for the amount of picture books I read!)