Children Reading Pictures: Interpreting Visual Texts

Children Reading Pictures documents and examines recent research into the ways children read images in picture books. This is the third element of the project following the marvellous International Symposium at Homerton College in 2000, ‘Art, Narrative and Childhood’ and the accompanying exhibition of picture book illustration, ‘Picture This’ at the Fitzwilliam Museum. The work of Styles and others at Homerton has done much to raise awareness of the role of pictures in the intellectual development of the child. It has also highlighted the evident low status accorded to the image in our education system.

Much of the work covered in this book hinges on what the authors acknowledge to be a ‘slippery concept’, visual literacy, a term much in use these days. Styles and Arizpe’s favoured definitions lean toward the ability to extract literal meaning from a picture or visual sequence. The problem is that pictures very often don’t translate into words, any more than, for example, a musical symphony does.

Three picture books are used in this study; Anthony Browne’s The Tunnel and Zoo and Satoshi Kitamura’s Lily Takes a Walk. Browne’s work is in many ways untypical of picture book illustration in that he does make liberal use of visual metaphors which lend themselves comfortably to this kind of analysis, e.g. tunnel equals journey, ball equals boy, book equals girl etc. It might have been interesting to have included an example of a more lyrical approach, Quentin Blake’s The Green Ship for example, to see what children make of this kind of ‘visual poetry’ (to borrow Sendak’s definition). The gulf between artists’ intentions and interviewers’ understanding is sometimes obvious. On one occasion Kitamura is doggedly encouraged to tell us that the ubiquitous pieces of rubbish in his pictures are a sign of his concern with environmental issues, while he is trying to explain that these are compositional/ atmospheric devices.

The responses of the children, though, are fascinating and captivating, and the researchers are sensitive to the way that the quietest children are often the ones most engaged with the pictures. Perhaps the last word should go to ‘Amy’, aged 5: ‘I always remember pictures, I sometimes forget words.’