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'Pictures to Share' devised by Helen Bate
These three picture books are sumptuous. No expense has been spared over the quality of reproduction, paper and binding. They are large format hardbacks, each following a theme (Childhood, The Countryside, Women’s Work), each containing 32 pages, made up of 14 photographs or paintings. On the opposite pages in large clear print are apposite quotations, always quite short. In addition, each book has very beautiful artist-designed endpapers.
The quotations used in the books are often from poems. For example, opposite a photograph of three boys holding baskets full of apples out towards the viewer there is an extract from the poem ‘Songs of Fairies Robbing an Orchard’ by Leigh Hunt:
Stolen sweets are always sweeter;
Stolen kisses much completer;
Stolen looks are nice in chapels,
Stolen, stolen, be your apples.
Next to the poem is a much smaller photograph of an apple core.
If one has any fault to find with the books it would be that the overall effect is nostalgic - they are predominantly backward-looking. On the covers Helen Bate, the deviser, compiler and publisher writes:
Pictures to Share books provide an alternative to the complex
and confusing modern media that surround us.
Since we have found that older people (including people with dementia) often respond positively to contemporary pictures and texts, one can be in full sympathy with this aim of clarification and simplification at the same time as wanting more images of life as it is lived today. Having said that, a picture of woman joiner complete with toolbelt is a pretty emphatic statement!
What is so reassuring about the way these images are presented is their directness, and they should provoke immediate responses. Above all, how wonderful that older people have not been fobbed off with second-best, as so often happens. The Pictures to Share books are as good as their editor can make them, and that is a message which will not be lost on their target audience.
More information is available on Pictures to Share.
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