Modern Monday -- Re-Zoom.

Istvan Banyai, Viking, 1995

Re-Zoom, a wordless picture book featuring artwork by the author/illustrator Istvan Banyai, is profound in the way it plays with perception and expectation. It opens with an extreme close-up of this image, then on page two we can see it's a rendering of an archer with an arrow ready to fly.

Page three reveals this image is not on some ancient cave wall, but on the wrist watch of a boy, though it takes two more pages before we know that for sure. The story is a series of images that zoom in and zoom out revealing you don't always know "where" you are with each image. What might seem like a house on a lake, will soon reveal it's a design on a lady's fan and so on. This book is a sequel to Zoom, which is also delicious and fun in the same way (Click here for a sample of images from that book). I just happen to prefer Re-Zoom. Istvan Banyai is a Hungarian born illustrator, designer, artist, and children's book author. His latest book is one called The Other Side (I think this also qualifies as a "Monday Must Have" for me.