Tana Hoban (February 20, 1917 – January 27, 2006) was an American photographer and creator of children’s books, including many picture books without any words.
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Career
Back in the U.S. she married photographer Edward E. Gallob in 1939 (they divorced in 1982) and self-taught herself photography.
She embarked upon a career in classified ad photography, and specialized in photographing children. She taught photography at the University of Pennsylvania from 1966–1969, and was a visiting lecturer across the country from 1974 to 1984.
Beginning in 1970, she wrote, designed, illustrated, and published on top of 110 titles.” In 1980, Hoban won a photograph album Caldecott Honor for “One Little Kitten”.
Hoban created Describe books out of photos that taught learned concepts such as signs and symbols, the alphabet, numbers, shapes, colors, animals, opposites, sizes, and prepositions. Her beforehand books were in black-and-white, but forward-thinking books are in color. Hoban explains that the native idea for her books came from hearing a balance from the Bank Street School in Manhattan where children were asked what they noticed on the pretension to school. After the children could not describe or recall anything, the teachers provided cameras and suddenly the kids were paying attention to their world, discovering the fabulous in the every day. Hoban claims that this was her own inspiration: “What is there, right there where I’m standing that I’m not seeing?” She goes on to say “I attempt in my books to catch a fleeting moment and an emotion in a artifice that touches children….Through my photograph and through retrieve eyes I attempt to say ‘Look! There are shapes here and everywhere, things to count, colors to see, and always, surprises.'”
Hoban spent the last two decades of her liveliness in Paris similar to her second husband, John G. Morris, a photo editor at The New York Times. She died in 2006 at a hospice in Louveciennes, France, outside Paris.
Some of Hoban’s papers are archived at the University of Minnesota while supplementary pieces are the University of Southern Mississippi.
Last update 2021-08-06