Fact or Ficton?

This study investigates photography as creative practice in children’s picturebook literature and its ability to enhance image-making by creating a hybrid that merges real and non-real worlds. Nudge's Tale, an award-winning children's environmental picturebook, is created for analysis. The photographic, narrative and research strategies executed within Nudge's Tale are discussed. Hybrid photography, an interdisciplinary merger between art and fact, creativity and ecology, is shown as a medium for reflecting animal perspectives within an environmental framework. This merger parallels the interdisciplinary movement, and resolves the paradox central to arguments about the current status of photographic realism by advocating the merger of authenticity and artistry. This study features an artistic audit of the works of Lauren Child, Shaun Tan and Dave McKean, who creatively utilise photography in contemporary picturebooks and David Doubilet’s photographic images which fuse underwater photojournalism with art.