Look Again!

New isn't always better. Sometimes books that are on our shelves have as much to say to us today as they did when they were first published. Look Again! by Tana Hoban (MacMillan, 1971) is now 30 years old, but it has much to offer teachers and students of both art and writing. Without a word of print beyond the title page, Hoban, a photographer and filmmaker, offers a self-guided lesson in observation. It's a book I would easily have overlooked if I hadn't been hunting for ways to relate art and writing for an upcoming presentation.It's really unusual, in fact, for me to pick up a wordless book. I'm a reader and a writer and I want text. I quickly flipped the pages, thinking I'd be moving on to something else momentarily. Then I flipped through again. "Clever," I thought. The first picture is a close-up of something in the natural world; the second picture gives the context so that you can tell what the camera had originally zoomed in on. Right away I started thinking of writing connections. The picture pairs would be a great way to teach detail and focus. I would probably show the "big" picture first and then show the close-up photo, a graphic illustration of the metaphor in Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird (pub/date): "All I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame." Writing small is what produces the best poetry, the best metaphors, the most striking insights.Since the format allows you to guess what you're seeing, then confirm or "disconfirm" your prediction, a reading lesson also took shape as I examined Look Again! When I played fair, I found it very hard to figure out what I was seeing, a lesson in perseverance but also a fair test of the book's power to sustain a teenager's interest. I enjoyed the book so much that my main complaint is it's too short-just nine sets of images.Hoban has also written Shapes and Things, using a photogram process instead (3-D objects are set on photo-sensitive paper and recorded without the use of a camera). Although I haven't found a copy yet, it sounds like a similar "guess" format.Originally available for $6.68, this is a book you may luck into at your local library or used bookstore.