ABSTRACT
Astrid Lindgren and Anna Riwkin-Brick’s series of photographic picturebooks about children from different countries aimed to promote tolerance and international understanding through children’s literature. The pioneering series soon stimulated similar picturebooks both in Nordic countries and internationally. They represent a very specifi c tendency within the modernist turn within Nordic children’s literature and furthermore demonstrate how children and childhood are depicted and constructed not only in this specifi c part of Astrid Lindgren’s production but also in Nordic children’s literature in general. In this chapter, I will analyze the use of photographic images in picturebooks as a part of an aesthetic and ideological context in the decades following the Second World War.
