New Exhibition Celebrates Photography in Children’s Books

A brand new exhibition on the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art celebrates the artwork of pictures in image books.

On view January 17, 2026 by way of June 7, 2026 on the museum in in Amherst, Massachusetts, CLICK! Photographers Make Picture Books contains greater than 90 photographic works and a collection of greater than 20 uncommon youngsters’s books courting from the Eighteen Nineties onwards. Among the artists featured are George Ancona, Peter Buckley, Nina Crews, Saxton Freymann, Tana Hoban, Marcel Imsand, Susan Kuklin, Roger Mello, Abelardo Morell, Ken Robbins, Shelley Rotner, Charles R. Smith Jr., William Wegman, Walter Wick, Mo Willems, Peng Yi, and Ylla (Camilla Koffler).

CLICK! is organized in three elements: ‘Real Worlds’ showcases pictures documenting points of the world round us, ‘Concept Books The Alphabet and Other Good Ideas” focuses on photos illustrating first lessons such as ABCs, and ‘Photo Theater’ concentrates on staged depictions of imaginary worlds.

Highlights include:

• images by the 20th century animal photographer Ylla who captured animals as individuals with human-like awareness and collaborated on books with Margaret Wise Brown and Jacques Prévert
• photographs by author-adventurer Peter Buckley inspired by his wartime experiences to foster cross-cultural understanding through children’s books including a series about the everyday lives of the world’s young people, starting with Cesare of Italy (1954)
• work by Chinese photographer Peng Yi  whose Children of the Tsaatan Reindeer Herders (2018) documents the lives of an intrepid family of reindeer herders along the remote borderlands of northern Mongolia as seen through the eyes of five-year-old Togshin
• the textless The First Picture Book (1930) by photographer Edward Steichen and his daughter Mary Steichen Martin which features black-and-white studio shots of objects from a toddler’s world
• Saxton Freymann’s exuberant images for How Are You Peeling? (2004) featuring cartoonish expressions on the “faces” of fresh fruit and vegetables
• Cinderella (1993) by William Wegman who dressed up his Weimaraner dogs for a retelling of the fairy tale
• Contradança (2011) by Brazilian artist Roger Mello which tells the story of a dollhouse world whose inhabitants must find their way through a labyrinth of mirrors
• Nina Crews’ The Neighborhood Mother Goose (2004) contains vibrant collaged images that take traditional nursery rhyme characters to the streets of present-day Brooklyn
• process images that trace the step-by-step creation of the mixed-media illustrations for Knuffle Bunny Too by Mo Willems, also set in Brooklyn which uses overlaying photographic streetscapes with drawings

“Photographer-illustrators have long trained their camera eye with young people in mind,” said author and CLICK! curator Leonard Marcus. “Their inventive, at times magical creations can be just what children, with their fascination both for real and imaginary worlds, crave.”