The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“Use Photographs to Tell a Story”

After reading The Truth About Stories, students will create a series of photographs that demonstrate their understanding of King’s arguments about photography as a form of storytelling and the ways that repetition and variation reveal important information about the storyteller’s perspective.

In The Truth About Stories, Thomas King argues that photography is a kind of storytelling. In this project, you will recreate some of King’s ideas in the form of visual argument. Your project will juxtapose photographs and text to show how photographs construct stories about their subjects through the choices a photographer makes. Your project will use a repeated subject, and the small changes you make from picture to picture will demonstrate how small variations create different “stories” and reveal the storyteller’s perspective.

• Create a series of three photographs, each with the same subject—a person, an object, a place, etc. Manipulate details of composition, lighting, focus, perspective, and so on in order to “say” something distinct about the subject in each photograph.
• You should not create photographs that are obviously “untrue” or “unrealistic.” A reasonable viewer glancing at the pictures should be willing to accept them as accurate rather than immediately rejecting them as staged or absurd.
• Place your three photographs into a larger presentation that allows a viewer to take in all three at once—a poster, an online slide, etc.
• Juxtapose quoted lines and paraphrases from relevant sections of King’s text with the visual images you have created. You should choose about three quotes and create about three paraphrases, arranging these in such a way that they comment on the meaning of the visual display you have created. This is your opportunity to demonstrate your understanding of the points King is making about how photographs function like stories, how photographers make choices that influence a photograph’s meaning, and how the storyteller’s perspective is made clear in these small choices. You can choose this evidence from throughout the book, as long as you are choosing material that clearly conveys these three ideas.

Teaching Suggestion: Students may need assistance thinking through how photographers make the kinds of choices described in this activity. For those struggling to understand how to differentiate their three pictures, you might suggest this 23-minute video by photographer Ted Forbes in which he shows how different photographs of the same subject can have entirely different effects on the viewer. Decide in advance about how much students will be allowed to rely on editing filters to create these different effects, so that you can share your preferences with students when you introduce the project. Also consider offering a few examples of how a photo might be too “staged” looking to fulfill the purposes of this assignment. This assignment can be completed quickly, with mobile phones, small classroom objects, and Google Slides, Prezi, or a similar application, or it can be a longer and more involved project depending on the expectations you establish.

Differentiation Suggestion: Students with visual or small-motor challenges may find the photography section of this assignment difficult. You might allow these students to work with a partner and divide the task so that these students are in charge of finding evidence in King’s text while a partner does the photography. Students with executive function challenges might be allowed to rely more heavily on photography filters, so that planning and coordinating are kept to a minimum.