He writes "Like words, in fact, pictures do not convey much meaning until we know the language in which they are expressed. Like words, they are "abstract", in the sense that they exist within systems of learned codes, and thus make little sense to anyone without a previous knowledge of those systems. Because pictures are premeated by the ideological assumptions of their culture, children will not understand pictures until they develop some understanding of the culture."
I disagree that cultural understanding is necessary for children to understand pictures. Children are not taught cultural understanding - it is something that goes on around them, it's not 'culture', it just is. Until a child begins to learn of other places in the world that have a different culture from what they are raised in, 'culture' itself has no meaning for them. An apple pictured in an ABC book is available to a child who lives in a culture where apples are available, if not in their own home and eaten by them. An ABC book for African children, say, will have something else representing the letter A, and there's no reason to presume that that child won't know what the object representing 'A' is. Nodelman's point is relevant to adults, not children.
On another point - "Once we have experience in books and reading, visual information directs our response to the story in a picture book before we even open the book. Particular expectations arise from each of the physical qualities of a book: its size and its shape, even the kind of paper it is printed on."
How can this be? We have only to look at the plethora of children's book available at the local library to know that regardless of size or substrate we will be looking at a picture book that was considered good enough to make it into the library's collection. Does he mean that the higher the quality of paper, the better the illustrated book will be in terms of its value to children? Or that a bigger book will have more illustrations than a smaller one? Has children's illustrated books changed so much since 1992 when Nodelman wrote this?
One of the children's books I have is Green Air, written by Jill Morris and illustrated by Lindsay Muir (Queensland: Greater Glider Productions, 1997). My children and I have gotten far more enjoyment from this book than they ever have had, or ever will have, from The Classic Fairy Tale Treasury (various author and illustrators, Kansas: Andrews and McMeel/Areil Books, 1995). The first is a thin paperback in a square format on good quality paper. The second is a tallish, thick rectangular hardback book with a padded cover and gold page edges, also on good quality paper. I'm sure the expectation of the gift-giver of each book was that they would be enjoyed again and again by my children. Not so; even over the course of reading to my children for many years I got far more requests for Green Air than I ever did for The Classic Fairy Tale Treasury. What's that old saying - 'don't judge a book by its cover'?
I'm going to quote a passage from page 131 of The Pleasures of Children's Literature:
"In earlier times before Euro-American culture became so pervasive, many anthropologists and explorers showed tribal people in Africa or South America realistic drawings and even photographs. These people, unaquainted with Western culture, were often unable to recognise what the pictures depicted. Because such depictions did not exist in their cultures, they had no strategies for making sense of them.
The pictures that did exist had purposes different from our pictures, and showed the world in a different way. Jan Deregowski reports a study in which some African villagers preferred a split-type drawing of an elephant (showing it from above as if it had been split open, so that all four feet could be seen), while Europeans preferred a top view that did not show the feet. Deregowski says that the different responses come from a different understanding of what pictures are for: "Split-representation drawings develop in cultures where the products of art serve as labels or marks of identification. In the cultures where drawings are intended to convey what an object actually looks like, this style is muted and the 'perspective' style is adopted."
Having disagreed with what Mr Nodelman has said and on a lighter note, I find this staggering - not he fact that the split-drawing style is used by the African villagers, but because I can't 'picture' what such a picture would look like! Luckily the internet is really is all-knowing, here's an example of split-drawing.
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