Telling Stories With Pictures in Your Personal History
Nan Barnes
Telling good stories is a critical part of writing a memoir or family history. But it’s possible to enhance the written stories by using images to illustrate them or to tell others that don’t make it into the text. Darren Rowse offers some excellent ideas on how to use pictures effectively in his article Telling Stories With Pictures on the Digital Photography School website.
In selecting the photographs you intend to use in your book begin by realizing what emotions, moods, story lines, ideas and messages the images you choose may convey. Individual photographs may convey a story in a single image by emphasizing the context in which its subject is placed or by displaying the relationship between two subjects.
A series of photographs might document a specific event or experience. Think of someone’s wedding photos or pictures taken on a vacation.
Using photos to tell stories can, on a larger scale, parallel the kind of thinking a writer does in planning a written story. Carefully select introductory photos which will present important characters visually and provide a view of the settings in which events will take place.
Consider themes you may want to develop as your story unfolds. The themes might relate to the types of photos you employ – visual themes or stylistic themes. Or the photographs might convey details of time, place or relationship by focusing on a single character or characters in a similar pose at several different moments in time or images of a setting taken years apart.
Select the final images by deciding what lasting impression you want to leave with your reader, just as you plan the book’s concluding chapter.
Click here to read Rowse’s full article.