Tarzipan Books, a new children’s book publisher, takes aim at teaching kids to be savvy readers of photographs. Their first offering, A-B-C Photography, was published last month after a successful Kickstarter campaign. The bright, poppy primer, with texts by Monte Packham, features images from contemporary photographers including Alec Soth, Nan Goldin, Peter Lindbergh, Wolfgang Tillmans, Martin Parr and others. The book uses 26 images to explore ideas ranging from how images evoke memory and use color to photography’s ability to freeze a moment. In one spread, Robin Schwartz’s charming image from “Amelia and the Animals” shows a girl buying a snack for some deer. The page introduces I for Imagine, and encourages the reader to imagine the scene as a trip to the ice cream counter for Amelia and her friends. An image by Julian Röder shows a person in a balaclava standing on a small pile of bricks in the middle of a busy street, from his series “The Summits.” It introduces W, for photography’s ability to prompt the questions Who, What, Where and Why, questions we’re left to wonder about the image.
Tarzipan Books was started by Jan and Marius von Holleben, brothers in Berlin. As they write about the book, while photography is everywhere today, for children and adults alike the questions remain “what makes a wonderful photo? What can photos tell us? And what can the world tell us with photos?”
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