The Artwork of Photography in Youngsters’s Books Explored in New Exhibition

A brand new exhibition explores the historical past of images in youngsters’s books from their rise within the Thirties to the current day.

Running from September 19, 2025, to February 1, 2026, L is for Look, an exhibition on the Photo Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, focuses on how photographic books have formed youngsters’s studying, creativeness, and engagement with the world. Most of the works on show come from the Photo Elysée library, one among Europe’s largest collections of images books, holding over 30,000 titles.

According to the exhibition, within the Thirties, youngsters’s photobooks have been primarily instructional, designed to complement vocabulary and data. Their graphic and materials design — together with spiral binding, interactive options, and fold-out pages — inspired a participatory method to studying. After World War II, photobooks developed to assist youngsters’s understanding of the world and variations amongst folks, exploring existence, origins, and disabilities whereas encouraging emotional expression.

From the 1950s onwards, under the influence of cinema, television, and live performance, children’s photobooks expanded into fiction. Through image sequencing, the books became narrative mediums, while photography gained artistic recognition as a tool for subjective expression. Today, advances in digital tools and mixed media have led to new approaches combining drawing and photography in children’s illustration.

Following its presentation in Lausanne, the exhibition L is for Look will tour Europe, visiting the Museum Folkwang in Essen, the Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles, the Photographers’ Gallery in London, U.Okay., the Centre National de l’Audiovisuel in Luxembourg, Foto Arsenal in Vienna, Australia, and concluding in 2028 on the Institut pour la Photographie in Lille, France.

---

Image credit: All images courtesy of Photo Elysée.