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.