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

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A group of seven children dressed as acrobats form a human pyramid on a dark stage, while the left page shows the number 7 with yellow chicks and a French poem about seven children playing circus acrobats.
Robert Doisneau, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Compter en s’amusant. La Guilde du livre, Lausanne, Éditions Clairefontaine, Lausanne, 1955. © ATELIER ROBERT DOISNEAU, GAMMA RAPHO

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.

Six black-and-white photos show playful kittens leaping, jumping, and pouncing energetically against a plain background. Some kittens are mid-air, while others are interacting in pairs.
Ylla (Camilla Koffler, generally known as), 85 cats, La Guilde du livre, Lausanne, 1952 © Pryor Dodge
A sandwich decorated to look like a face with olive eyes, salami tongue, and cheese teeth sits on a plate next to a white mug with a cartoon dinosaur and hot chocolate inside.
Reinhard Matz, Frühstück (Breakfast), 1995-2000 © Reinhard Matz
Three young children walk along a paved path in front of a house. The girl in the center wears a yellow dress and carries a green bucket, while the two boys beside her wear casual clothes and appear to be talking or eating.
Enzo Arnone, Ciccì Coccò, 2025 © Enzo Arnone

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.

A smiling woman claps her arms, whereas on the alternative web page, two arms create a fowl shadow on a wall. Text reads: "Hands do many different things...Clap for joy, flap like wings.
Tana Hoban avec Edith Baer, The Wonder of Hands, Éditions Parents Magazine, New York, 1970 © Miela Ford
A child blows on a dandelion in a black and white photo on the left; on the right, there is a small abstract black and white striped square centered on a blank background.
Tana Hoban, Look Again!, Macmilan Publishing Company, New York, 1971
© Estate of Tana Hoban

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.

A large red letter "B" and lowercase "b" appear on the left side with the word "ball" written in English and French. On the proper, 4 balls, together with a striped one, sit on a floor inside a internet.
Emmanuel Sougez, Alphabet, Éditions Antoine Roche, Paris, 1932. All rights
reserved
A young person in a buttoned shirt raises one hand, pointing upward, with a yellow squiggle drawn above their finger on a plain background.
Adam Broomberg et Oliver Chanarin, A-Z Humans and Other Animals, 2016 © Late Estate of Broomberg and Chanarin

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.


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