Photos are the driving force behind the story told in most albums–no photo, no story. It shouldn’t be that way! Your photos are obviously important. They are a terrific visual record—but the photos do not pinpoint the story. They don’t tell the date, don’t tell who was there, don’t tell what happened before or after […]

Photos are the driving force behind the story told in most albums–no photo, no story. It shouldn’t be
that way!

Your photos are obviously important. They are a terrific visual record—but the photos do not pinpoint the story. They don’t tell the date, don’t tell who was there, don’t tell what happened before or after the photo was taken. You need to write lifestories in your photo albums to complete the ‘picture’.

You need to write your lifestories into your photo albums.

In The Photo Scribe/Writing the Stories Behind Your Photos, you learn to tell a simple lifestory using the events and relationships of your life, in addition to the photos you happen to have on hand, as your primary organizing element. This principle, more than any other presented in The Photo Scribe, will help you make meaningful lifestory photo albums using photos, captions, and cameo narratives.

Telling Your Lifestory

Photos depict an external version of our lives. They capture only material, visual things—leaving the viewer to guess about the deeper, sometimes hidden meaning. The complexities of a given situation or experience may seem too difficult or embarrassing to put into words—so we leave them out and stick to names and dates. Or…

We let those parts of the story show up in the storyline we tell a friend—perhaps in an off-hand manner—as we leaf through the pages of the album. This oral sharing fills the need we have to communicate the more complex story, but the spoken words exist only briefly. Once you have finished speaking, the story is again at risk of being forgotten. We begin to wish we had a fuller story of that moment. We wish there were a way we could keep the memory of the moment alive.

There is a Way to Keep your Memory Vivid

In The Photo Scribe/Writing the Stories Behind Your Photos, we suggest you do the following:

1. Memory List the event.

2. Write a simple 30 to 50 words description of the event. (Hint: avoid cute tags like “Miss America” on a photo of your four-year-old.)

3. Stretch your description over the several photos you want to keep.

That’s your start.

Good luck photoscribing your albums.