My father always lined us up by the car on holidays to photograph us; my brother looking bored, me smirking, and my mother just trying to make the best of it. I have dozens of these photographs.  My brother and I always complained about having to pose for them, but whenever my father took us up on our advice for candid pictures there I was caught with my mouth wide open, my eyes closed or looking oddly furtive.

What photographs do you have on your desk right now? Or on the wall or on your dresser or in albums or on your computer?  What do they say about you and the people you love? 

Writers are crazy about photographs, both in fiction and in memoir.  They can lend a kind of shorthand to events. Anne Tyler in her 1980 novel Morgan’s Passing writes of a family photograph album with 15 pages devoted to the babyhood of the first of seven daughters (Amy sleeping, nursing, yawning, bathing, examining her fist….) And then as more daughters arrived on the scene, the photos speed up and the setting turns into the beach:

"The girls were eternally coconut-oiled and gleaming….Always laughing. Where were the tears and quarrels, the elbowing for excessive amounts of love and space and attention? What about all those colds and tonsillectomies?  Where was Molly’s stammer or Susan’s chronic nightmares?…."   

In one page you get a whole history of this family through their photo album.

Carolyn See begins Dreaming, Hard Luck and Good Times in America, her autobiography and family history, with a search through 75 years of family photographs and a description of a picture of her Aunt Helen,

"..the cruelest person I ever knew, dressed up to beat the band." And then her sister Rose, "..already wearing mascara, one of the things that would get her into so much trouble down the line."

In Mark Doty’s memoir, Firebird, he describes the early love between his parents that he sees in a photograph:

"…she’s all of seventeen, and he merely twenty-three; I feel protective toward them, want to keep them right here, in this bright moment in Chattanooga sixty years ago, the flash of the photographer’s lamp finding its match in their unmistakable joy."

In her memoir, The Kiss, Kathryn Harrison writes of watching her grandmother cutting out pictures of family members she dislikes, rather than discarding the whole picture and event.

"Often, she cuts out only the heads and leaves the anonymous bodies behind as a reminder of her displeasure, and her ruthlessness."

In class Denise writes about a photograph taken of her as a teenager with her grandfather in May 1970:

"…the lack of awareness that had stifled all of us almost makes sense to me now. There’s a visual cacophony going on in that small 3×5 photograph taken with my own cheap instamatic…One set of drapes is a green on green brocade, and the other set has an art deco pattern with vines of large pink flowers… "

She goes on to describe more of the room, the dress she’s wearing that she sewed herself and her grandfather’s old flannel shirt:

"None of them ever figured out that I was pregnant. And I never figured out that my grandfather’s days were numbered, or that my father’s heart was getting ready to explode from the stress of trying to keep his business from going under. I never figured out that my mother quit drinking milk and eating anything but the smallest portion of meat to stretch the grocery budget. There were lots of things that none of us knew about the others then, and it surprises me that so much of the unknown is visible now in one old photograph."

To Do: Photographs make powerful writing prompts.  You can use your own family photos and describe the body language, the clothes, questions you now have, and anything you remember from the time the pictures were taken. Or if you’re writing fiction you can start cutting out pictures from magazines and create a collection of them, then on days when you feel less than inspired, pull one out  at random and do a five minute quick write about anything that flashes into your mind while looking at it. The chances are you’ll come up with something that will be useful for your novel or short story.

To Do: If you’re looking for a good novel to read, Anne Tyler’s latest is out this week: Digging to America.  And Carolyn See, another favorite writer, also has a novel out this month: There Will Never Be Another You. (And check out her essay from last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, “Spanish Stucco and Common Dreams”.)