Born under a visual sign.

Ever since it became apparent that baby boomers had decided to reproduce, smart money has gone "young": Disney's profit margins are off the charts, children's computer programs and CD-ROMs top best-seller lists, and Sega and Nintendo continue to expand exponentially. It's no secret that everyone from Michael Jackson to Apple computer knows that capturing the youth market is important to long-term success - once a fan, always a fan. But markets and profit margins are only part of the equation; the other half is harder to quantify, having to do with the unique bond between parent and child and how adults imagine a pleasurable and beneficial upbringing for their children.

In view of this equation and the relative literacy of baby boomers, it's not surprising that children's books have been experiencing their own little boom. What is surprising - given the conservative drift of American politics and the cynical sex-and-violence salesmanship of techno and TV culture -is that children's books remain a profitable (if just barely) bastion of "liberal humanism." Books for young readers regularly espouse "values," such as the care and assistance of those less fortunate, racial and gender equality and nonviolence. Compared to movies and video games, children's books are intended to influence children in a more serious way, as if their young readers would actually grow up to emulate what they read and saw in the pages of their books. Books don't always provide kids with easy answers to life's problems, but the best make tough solutions understandable through the most improbable fictions and fantastic illustrations. For young readers, lessons always seem secondary to the visceral and imaginary pleasures of books.

Although it didn't start that way, lessons have become central to the dramatic increase in photo books for young readers. The first wave of these photo books attempted to do what children's books had always done: to present fantastic illustrations for funny or fabulous narratives. Cindy Sherman's Fitcher's Bird (1992), William Wegman's Cinderella (1993) and Sarah Moon's Little Red Riding Hood (1983) are traditional children's books with photo illustrations instead of drawn or painted illustrations. Recently, though, the trend in photo books has shifted away from illustrated fictions and toward nonfiction treatments - something photography can do more readily than drawing or painting. Employing photographs in much the same way they are used in the general culture (as factual illustration), the new nonfiction and historical photo books steer fantasy toward the realm of real people and events. Once they get to this subject, the lessons begin: on rising above adversity, working hard, friendship, but most of all, on photography. Unlike technical how-to books, these books are viewing how- tos, working backward from finished pictures to lessons in photographic principles, politics and meaning.

The most popular new type of photo book is the artist biography. Aside from providing built-in role models for young people, biographies give authors the opportunity to discuss the way specific photographs were made. Jacques-Henry Lartigue: Boy with a Camera (1994) by John Cech is actually less a biography than an extended meditation on what it's like to make photographs from a child's perspective. To Cech, that means play. Whether it's a self-portrait made by floating a camera on a piece of wood in the bathtub, or an action shot of Lartigue's brother Zissou flying a glider, Cech describes Lartigue's photography as extensions of his ability to play with both his camera and his family and friends. It's a wonderful way to think about photography, and Lartigue's funny and marvelous pictures make it convincing. Cech's concentration on fun and games means that history enters the book mostly as antiquated technology (Lartigue had to "take the cork off the lens and count to three") and nostalgia ("No one, no matter how old, seemed to have forgotten how to play"). Unfortunately, fun and games aren't all there is to life, and Cech's book lacks the downside and drama that make accomplishment valuable. In the end, Boy with a Camera reads more like historical wish-fulfillment than a history lesson.

The same could not be said about Robyn Montana Turner's Dorothea Lange (1994), part of the "Portraits of Women Artists for Children" series. Turner begins her biography with a no-nonsense sermon on the sexist attitudes and practices Lange overcame to become a working photographer. The book covers Lange's difficult childhood and adolescence, in which she lived in poverty in New York and New Jersey and suffered from polio. And if that's not enough, there's Lange's later divorce and her problematic relationship with her own children. Lange's ability to overcome her own social (and physical) adversity serves as a point of departure for Turner to discuss the function of Lange's work-helping others to overcome personal adversity and social injustices through documentary photography. In a memorable section, Turner relates how thousands of pounds of free food were distributed to starving farm workers after the publication of Migrant Mother in 1936. Turner's social realism has its limits, especially when it comes to art. According to Turner, Lange's life as an artist was shaped by "secrets of the heart," such as Lange's first epiphany that she "had a special talent"; her 1929 "spiritual awakening" to social documentary; and the observation that it was Lange's "innermost feelings - her instinct - not her reason" that led her to photograph Migrant Mother. Defending the importance of emotion and spirituality (and even the relevance of social documentary) may not be cutting-edge theory for adults, but young readers might just see it as a connection to the deep and always mysterious continuum between social conscience and artistic drive.

One of the problems with the artist biography is that no matter how varied the work or life of the photographer in question, the discussion remains tied to (and in a certain sense promotes) the experiences, values and photographs of that individual. Sylvia Wolf goes conventional biography one better by combining five life stories into her book Focus: Five Women Photographers (1994). Describing the lives and work of Julia Margaret Cameron, Margaret Bourke-White, Flor Garduno, Sandy Skoglund and Lorna Simpson, Wolf brings to the forefront what the other biographies only hint at: diversity. The women in this book are different in ways that are significant and understandable to young people: some are married, some are not; some are mothers, some are not; some had good working relationships with men, some did not. Just as important are these women's differences as photographers. From the friendships that motivated Cameron's photography to Bourke-White's determination to photograph what she was told she couldn't; from Garduno's rediscovery of tradition, to Skoglund's love of fantasy and Simpson's fractured narratives of racism, Wolf's examination of these photographers' work covers an imposing range of photographic practices, issues and history. Although the technical explanations are occasionally too much for the text to bear, Wolf's approach to biography connects individual accomplishment to social aspirations, historical photography to contemporary work, and, most importantly, art to the world in which it was made.

Whereas Cech's, Turner's and Wolf's books get at photographic meaning through the back door of biography, A. D. Coleman's Looking at Photographs: Animals (1994) is unabashedly "about understanding photographs." Like it's namesake, John Szarkowski's Looking at Photographs (1973), Coleman's book explains photographs one at a time, each animal picture accompanied by its own short, critical text (and additional inset photo). Although the amazing collection of photographs range from the microscopic (Davis Scharf's Flea) to the historical (Stieglitz's The Terminal) to the playful (Tony Mendoza's Ernie with Dragonfly) to the fantastic (David Dioubilet's Leafy Sea Dragon), the heart of this book is Coleman's short essays. Concise, knowledgeable and occasionally ingenious, Coleman's texts explain through example, describing everything from basic technical terms like exposure to complicated concepts such as point-of-view and composition. Like Szarkowski, Coleman's approach to understanding photographs rests first and foremost on understanding how photographs are made, especially on the decisions that lead to interesting visual statements. While Coleman seldom discusses individual photographers, his approach highlights human agency far more than any of the above-mentioned biographies. Unfortunately, human agency stops at photographic decision-making for Coleman. Wonderful stories that they are, Coleman's essays never address how photographic decisions relate to larger social issues and responsibilities. Even brief asides about Peter Beard's efforts to document the disappearance of the African elephant or the difficult life of Mary Ellen Mark's circus animals would have expanded the book's explanations not only of photography but also of the complex ways in which human beings interact with the world around them. Young people deserve and demand that kind of honesty.

In his or her own way, all of these authors have taken it upon themselves to teach young people something about photographs - how they work and what they mean. Shooting Back from the Reservation: A Photographic View of Life by Native American Youth (1994) turns the tables by giving young people the chance to tell grownups (and other youth) about their lives and, by extension, about photography. Developed in 1989 by photojournalist Jim Hubbard to "empower children at risk by teaching them photography," Shooting Back is patterned after Wendy Ewald's ground-breaking Portraits and Dreams (1985), the result of a project in which children from a community in Eastern Kentucky made pictures of their lives and fantasies. The basic idea is simple: Instead of leaving it up to others (adults), give young people the equipment and knowledge to represent their own lives. Besides providing a way for youth to acquire some sense of self esteem and "visual literacy," Shooting Back also aims to call attention to the plight of at-risk youth. At-risk or not, the photographers of Shooting Back responded to their newfound photographic power in ways that surprise, delight and concern. The photographs in this book are terrific. That being said, it must also be admitted that Hubbard, not the project's photographers, "selected" the photographs that eventually made up the book. Hubbard's editing doesn't undermine the truth of the individual photographs as much as it does the credibility of the project as a whole. Combine this with the criticism Hubbard has taken for his financial and editorial control of the Shooting Back negatives and you have a cautionary tale for those who gladly grant young people the creativity and voice of adults, but who find it hard to extend them adult versions of economic and representational rights.

Like most books for young readers created by adult authors, these five are more about what adults imagine children need to know than about what young people actually do or don't know. For all their differences in approach and content, there is a striking similarity in these books, representing a new adult consensus that, first and foremost, young readers need to know how to look at photographs and how to behave as viewers and consumers. Underlying this new approach is the fear and guilt that adults have created an overloaded image-world in which young people (and many adults) can't separate representations of reality from reality itself. Each of these books, in its own way, is an intervention of sorts: an attempt to clarify the line separating the "real" world and the world of representations, a real gun and a picture of a gun. Whether any book can accomplish this conceptual leap or whether the image/reality line will remain unclear for children is a matter of conjecture. Be that as it may, the necessity of distinguishing reality from representations is important to the better world these authors imagine for children - a world in which people respond to the overwhelming presence of media rather than deny it, a world in which photographs can still affect human consciousness in complicated yet positive ways rather than simplistic evil ones. All of these authors honor their young readers by testifying that young people are worth the effort, that children have the power to overcome media titillation, and that there are still responsible adults who are working toward a responsible future. Maybe that's the lesson young people would most like to see adults learn.

VINCE LEO is a photographer and writer living in Minneapolis.