picture books
J. Staub: A instrucção da creança / J. Staub’s Bilderbuch, vol. 1
J. Staub: A instrucção da creança / J. Staub’s Bilderbuch, vol. 2
J. Staub: A instrucção da creança / J. Staub’s Bilderbuch, vol. 3
J. Staub: J. Staub’s Bilderbuch, vol. 4
J. Staub/U. Kollbrunner: J. Staub’s Bilderbuch, vol. 5
J. Staub/U. Kollbrunner: J. Staub’s Bilderbuch, vol. 6
“There is power in looking” (hooks, 2003, p. 207) and within white cultures the white subject is constituted as the subject who can visualize the world (hooks, 2003; Mirzoeff, 2011). As a spectator, I enter the cover of the picture book series A instrucção da creança (1904/5) through a circular cut out, peeking into the family home. The domestic scene emphasizes the intimacy and physical proximity elicited by the modality of the picture book. To “get a good look” for oneself, it is necessary to huddle together, to come close to the images and each other. The figure of the mother or caretaker, who is wearing a white dress, frames the scene and simultaneously guides my gaze towards its crucial event: children looking at images. The act of ‘peeping’ is charged with connotations of voyeurism: so evidently establishing the division between who is seeing without being seen – the subject – and who is being seen without the possibility of returning the gaze – the objectified.
Another interesting visual strategy in the cover image stems from the mise-en-abîme. The picture book cover is repeated in itself and thereby suggests an infinite, or as the term brings to mind, “abyssal” mirroring. It seems almost too preposterous as an analogy but I cannot help touch on it: the mis-en-abîme suggests an imaginary of white people looking at white people looking at images that perpetuates into infinity while simultaneously erasing the white spectator constantly from the image through the peeping mechanism. This conveys one of the paradoxes of white identity as Dyer puts it, of displaying whiteness while maintaining a position of invisibility (Dyer, 1997, pp. 29–30).
Positional note
I am a white, German, able-bodied cis-woman doing a PhD at a university in the South of Europe with the experience of growing up in a working-class milieu. In my work, I commit to the study of visual cultural, critical historiography in education and post-colonial, decolonial and feminist theory. I am particularly invested in images and imaginaries of 'nature' and the ways they are producing a hegemonic relations with the world and its beings.