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Photographs and Illustrations in Your Memoir

Photographs and illustrations can enhance the stories you tell. They can even drive the story, if you wish. Explore the use of visual material to achieve your goals as a storyteller.

Composing Photo Captions

A snappy, informative caption can improve a photo’s effectiveness, often providing an element your story lacks. Learn how to construct captions that will bring out the best in your illustrations.

The Best of Your Family Photo Albums

This article offers some simple guidelines for selecting photographs to illustrate your book. What kind of image quality is necessary? Which photographs might tell your story best?

Photoshop Touch-ups and Tricks

Are your photographs faded or discolored? Does the photo’s composition need improvement? See how you can use Photoshop to improve the quality of photos you include in your memoir.

Photos & Illustrations in Your Memoir

The conventional wisdom says that a picture is worth a thousand words. It seems more accurate to say that a picture is better together with a thousand words. As you create your memoir or family history book you can use photos, or scanned images of documents or family memorabilia, to dramatize and enhance the stories you are telling or even to illustrate stories you haven’t included in your text. Photos can bring your stories into sharp relief if you use them to:

Identify people – Uncle Harry, or your best friend Susie
Show relationships –you during childhood with your grandmother, or your grandfather with his poker pals
Show locations – the house you grew up in, or your trip to the south of France
Illustrate a moment in time – you in 1963, or you at retirement
Emphasize a thematic tone – illustrate the topic family with a series of family group photos, or the topic accomplishments with a photo of your mother receiving the employee of the month award
Document an event – your wedding, or the impact of a tornado on the family farm

One important decision you must make is whether you want to use images to illustrate words or use words to describe images.

If you decide that you want the images to be the primary organizing principle you will produce a photo book. This type of presentation was pioneered by the photo journalism in magazines like Life and Look where stories were told with dramatic pictures accompanied by relatively limited text. You might call it a Visual Memoir. In creating this type of book authors often select the images first and eliminate stories not directly tied to the images.

If you decide that your stories come first and images second you’ll use the photos to complement the stories. Images will be used:

To emphasize points in the written story
To clarify points in the written story
To create emotional impact which expands that conveyed by the written story

Used in this way the photographs and other images allow a purely visual and non-verbal experience to break up the text.

Captions are an important consideration however you decide to use your images. Ask yourself, does the photo need identification? Some photos are self-explanatory and require no caption. Others, particularly pictures like head shots of people, require only that the subject be identified. Action shots often require more extensive captioning to indicate the 5 Ws - who, what, when, where and why – of the photograph. You may also decide to group photos without captions to convey an atmosphere as your stories unfold.

Careful attention to the use of photographs and other illustrations in your book can make for a much more pleasant visual experience for your reader. This is particularly important for younger readers who have grown up in an age of TV, video games and the internet.