Ideas for Working with Old Photographs

Photographs are a wonderful stimulus for storytelling.

• Order photographs from museums or archives (See Where to Find Northern Books and Resources in the Useful Resources section.) You have to plan this project several months in advance because it often takes that long to get photographs. You will need a budget for this; there are costs involved with ordering the photographs. Through some of the museum or archive’s web sites you can search for photographs using a community name or a person’s name. When you find a photograph that you want, write down the reference number and other information about the photo. A small number of photographs can be downloaded and printed directly from the web site.

or...

• You can collect old photographs from people in the community. Scan or copy them and quickly return the originals to the owners.
• Invite Elders and other community members to look at the photographs and identify the people or places in them. Does anyone know who took the picture and when? What stories do people remember about the people and places in the photographs?
• Record the stories or take notes. Write up the stories and publish them with copies of the pictures.
• The facilitator teaches mini-lessons on the writing process, syllabic keyboarding, grammar and any other topics as they come up.
• As you work with the photographs and learn the stories, keep journal entries about your thoughts and feelings during the process.
• The stories and photographs could take different forms: books, bulletin board displays in a spot where people in the community can easily see them, web sites, community events. If your local community TV channel has the capacity, you could post the photographs on the community channel and then host a radio or TV phone-in show in which people could call up with stories about the photographs.

Working with Photos in Sanikiluaq

Two young people in Sanikiluaq developed a project to publish old photographs on the local TV channel. Community members helped to identify people in the pictures.

The following is the reprinted article with pictures entitled Bringing History to Life published in News North on February 24, 2003.