This paper takes as its point of departure a particular photography book, The First Picture Book. Everyday Things for Babies first published in 1930 and designed for children at young age. The book’s origins can be traced back to a collaboration between Edward Steichen, his daughter Mary Steichen Calderone and the Bureau of Psychological Experiments (1916-1930) in New York. The latter dedicated its work to the educational psychology of the child and progressive educational practices. The paper will analyze how phenomenology, the materiality of things and artefacts, sensory vision, aesthetic education, and science-based concepts of child development were forming a conceptual alliance with photography, then, perceived as a mode of ‘objective’ display. Science-based approaches to childhood not only have stressed the objectivity of educational research, but, on a normative level, were also meant to foster advancement, innovation and reform related to educational practices and societal change. Within this framework, observation and seeing became key:  (1) they functioned as basic modes of research to support the intended production of ‘factual’ knowledge about the child, and (2) they were coined as central aspects of children’s ability to develop intellectually and, on the long run, to contribute to societal transformation. Therefore, a strong alliance of Photography (as a mode of observation), science-based developmental psychology and ideas of societal reform by educating children’s sensory vision was somehow evident. The paper aims to explore normative impacts of photographic images in children's books, in that their use was meant to pin down what, 'objectively', should be perceived and which meaning should be ascribed to it. Photographic techniques (not only used in commercial photography, but also in scientific laboratories) such as cropping and enlarging images helped not only to exclude contextual information, but also to suppress the normativity, difference and diversity of 'facts' or 'factual truth' in modern approaches to education. 

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