"I" of the Beholder: An Interview with Tana Hoban

Since the early 1970s, the American-born Tana Hoban has defined the art of photography for children and set its standards. From Look Again! (1971) to Cubes and Cones (1999), Hoban has created scores of concept books that present the visual world in a new light, in new relationships, in new sequences. Her photographs and the design with which they are put into book form stimulate the mind, as in Pound's exhortation to "Make it new" and Huxley's to "cleanse the doors of perception." Indeed, Hoban calls hers "books of perception." The world she captures is not abstract, or surreal or psychedelic. Quite the opposite; it's the everyday street, the open market, the construction zone, the park, the face, the hands that one notices in her pictures anew or for the first time. In black-and-white books from the fuzzy rabbit of Where Is It? (1974) to the stark, cognitively conscious board books for infants, White on Black and Black on White (1995), Hoban uses angles, perspective, and contrast in innovative ways. And color itself, naturally, is the conceptual basis for many of Hoban's books, like Is It Red? Is It Yellow? Is It Blue? (1978). Activities are sometimes her focus, for example, Dig Drill Dump Fill (1975), as are prepositions, Over, Under, and Through (1973). Shapes, relationships, comparisons, opposites, animals like pandas and kittens are also unifying themes, as in Is It Larger? Is It Smaller? (1985) and Shapes, Shapes, Shapes (1986). Since these images of real things and common experience are not culture bound, Hoban's books communicate at the most fundamental levels--awareness of oneself in the world and awareness of the world itself.

Hoban has supported herself through her photography since she graduated from Philadelphia's School of Design (now the Moore College of Art) and her career began. In the 1950s, she was called "the best child photographer in America today" by Camera Arts Magazine (169). By 1983, an essayist in The Lion and the Unicorn identified Hoban as "[p]robably the most productive author to reflect Piaget's concepts" (Hirsch 147). Interestingly, many of the awards she has received have been in the category of books of science. Hoban's photographs have been displayed in the Museum of Modern Art and in numerous shows and galleries; she has made several films, and the international honors she has received vary from awards for particular books to awards for her entire body of work, such as the Special International Award bestowed upon her in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1987. A remarkable number of her books stay in print. More likely than not, several are on the shelves of your local library. Available in bookstores and on-line, favorites such as A Children's Zoo (1985) are consistently reissued in new formats and sizes.

The 1990s have been productive for her. She has published some twenty new books, including a collaboration with her daughter, Miela, to whom she dedicated the outstanding More, Fewer, Less (1997). The twenty-fifth anniversary of her collaboration with Edith Bauer, The Wonder of Hands, was noted by Macmillan with a handsome hardback re-issue. From her alma mater in Philadelphia, she was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1992, and she spoke at commencement ceremonies. Her advice to the students comes out of her own experience: "Start at the top."

In that representative year, 1992, Hoban published three books with her longtime editor Susan Hirschman at Greenwillow Books: Spirals, Curves, Fantails, and Lines; Look Up, Look Down; and The Moon Was the Best, the latter in collaboration with Charlotte Zolotow. Most of the pictures for Spirals, Curves, Fantails, and Lines were taken in Paris with Hoban's customary Nikkon, at a outdoor market near her residence. The spirals and curves are a cockatiel's crest, beak, and fantail; swirling bananas and oranges; piled pink scallops; a ferris...