How to record the story behind a photo
A practical method for getting the story out of the person who holds it, without turning the afternoon into an interview.
Most people freeze when you point a recorder at them and ask them to remember. The trick is not to ask them to remember. It is to give them something to look at and get out of the way.
Put the photo in their hands
Not on a screen across the table. In their hands, at whatever distance suits their eyes. Physical prints work best, but a phone held by them rather than by you is fine. People talk about what they are holding. They perform at what they are being shown.
Then say nothing for a bit. The silence does most of the work.
Ask about the edges, not the middle
“Who is that?” is a test, and it feels like one. If the answer has gone, the afternoon stalls in the first minute.
Ask instead about what surrounds the moment:
- What was the weather doing?
- Whose house was that?
- What were you all there for?
- Who took this? Where were they standing?
- What happened afterwards?
These have no wrong answers, and they are how names surface anyway. Somebody describing a Sunday will name the person who drove them there without being asked to.
Let them go off-topic
The story that arrives instead of the one you asked for is usually the better one. A question about a coat becomes a story about a shop, which becomes the reason the family moved. Follow it. You can always come back to the photo, and the photo is not the point.
Record from the start
Not from the moment it gets interesting, because you will miss the beginning of it. Start the recording when you sit down, mention that you have, and then forget about it visibly so they can too.
A phone flat on the table records perfectly well. Do not put a microphone on a stand in front of somebody’s face unless you want them to talk like a witness.
Keep the uncertainty
“I think it was 1971, but it might have been the year after” is more useful than either date on its own, because it tells the next person how much to trust it. Write down the hedge, not just the guess. Cirluma records an approximate date as approximate rather than forcing a false precision.
Get it out of your phone the same week
This is where most of it dies. A recording sitting in a voice-memos app, unlabelled, is already halfway to lost. Put it with the photo it belongs to, with the name of who is speaking, while you still remember which file is which.
Do it more than once
Nobody remembers everything in one sitting, and the second conversation is almost always better than the first, because they have been thinking about it since. Two short afternoons beat one long one.
If they say there is nothing to tell
They are usually wrong, and they usually mean nothing important. Say you want the ordinary parts: what they ate, what the kitchen looked like, who was annoying. The ordinary parts are exactly what disappears first, and exactly what somebody will want in thirty years.