story prompts
When I was teaching regularly, I often brought in photographs to use as writing prompts. A good photograph can really get a discussion going and imaginations firing.
The Library of Congress is a great resource for old photographs. The Prints and Photographs Division has an online catalogue which is getting bigger all the time. The Bain Collection is online, and it's full of incredible stories waiting to be told.
Here's the blurb about the Bain Collection:
The George Grantham Bain Collection represents the photographic files of one of America's earliest news picture agencies. The collection richly documents sports events, theater, celebrities, crime, strikes, disasters, political activities including the woman suffrage campaign, conventions and public celebrations. The photographs Bain produced and gathered for distribution through his news service were worldwide in their coverage, but there was a special emphasis on life in New York City. The bulk of the collection dates from the 1900s to the mid-1920s, but scattered images can be found as early as the 1860s and as late as the 1930s.
Over the next couple days I'm going to post a couple of the photographs there which are most interesting to me as a storyteller.
I'm starting with one taken in 1908 on the east side of Manhattan. The only information on the photo's page is sparse: a group of women discussing evictions and a rent strike. You can click on the photograph to get a bigger version of it.
What I like about this is the way the women are dressed against the cold, aprons and many layers of skirts and multiple shawls, in contrast to the austere architecture of the church behind them. I imagine what it must have meant for one of these women to join a rent strike, to risk eviction. I imagine each of them with a husband and children and at least one elderly parent, all living together in two small rooms in a walk up. What it would mean to chance losing those rooms. What courage it must have required, and what anger.