We have all heard the saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

Once you put all of those pictures together, you’ve got yourself a short story. In essence, then, every picture is a visual representation of a piece of some larger story.

People often fail to realize how vital stories are to our lives. Look at it this way: Why else would stories be one of the few aspects of history that never seem to die? There is so much versatility in the purposes stories serve; some hold culture, some tell lessons, others simply grasp onto memories too priceless to forget.

American author William Timothy O’Brien, more commonly referred to as Tim O’Brien, in his novel The Things They Carried, writes, “Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are.”

Personally, when I hear or read this quote, I envision a woman sitting all alone, next to a fireplace, one that is too small to provide any warmth, but big enough to shed light onto the photo album that she is searching through as she seeks the answer to all of life’s problems.

As the flickering light of the fire laps at the pages, she searches the images, hoping that one of the photos – one of the “stories” she is examining – may reveal something grand to her.

I’m sure not everyone interprets this quote in the same way that I do, but I am also sure that a photo album could (and many times does) take the place of the stories of which Tim O’Brien speaks.

If a few pictures are truly worth a short story, then a photo album is like a novel. However, the album is not just any type of novel; it is an autobiography. With pictures dating back as far as one may wish, the photo album pictures are not only visually aesthetic, but also a testimony to the manifested and latent changes one has experienced. They are a reminder of the foundation from which one’s life may have begun, and a stronghold to the values once held dear.

Photo albums come in different forms. There is the traditional one in a sort of hard-cover case; there are the pictures in albums contained by undefined boundaries, like those seemingly random pictures hanging around on a computer or in picture frames decorating the walls of a house; and there are those more public and social albums, such as the ones on Instagram.

If pictures are worth so much, then why not invest meaning into the ones you have? Let pictures be more than a superficial pose for a camera; let them tell your story.