Lyrical Pictogram - From Picture to Prose

A century of personal photography.

In 1900, Kodak introduced the Brownie camera and thus placed photography into ordinary hands. A hundred years later, the first mobile phones with built‑in cameras arrived, and the smartphone completed the transformation: almost every person now carries a powerful camera everywhere they go.

We take photographs to preserve moments; a face, a place, a celebration, a holiday. Someone we love, something we love, something small that becomes precious with time. But a photograph can only capture what was visible in that fraction of a second. It can hold the laughter, but not the joke; the expression, but not the nickname; the scene, but not the smell of the place or the reason that afternoon still matters twenty years later.

Those parts live in memory.

And when photograph and memory meet, something rather wonderful can happen; they can become a story.

Can memories really become a story?

Absolutely. And they do not need to be monumental. Some of the richest stories hide inside moments that appear entirely ordinary to everyone except the people who lived them.

Perhaps you have a photograph from a childhood holiday, or a candid look exchanged at a wedding. A snap of a couple on their first date, now inseparable. A baby or a grandparent caught laughing. The much‑loved cat occupying the chair it’s not allowed to sit on. A silly moment with an old friend. The house that hasn’t been home for thirty years but somehow always will be.

The importance of a memory isn’t measured by its grandeur. It matters because it matters to you. And that is where the story begins.

What do I need to create a personalised story?

Very little.

Choose a photograph that means something to you. Then consider what the photograph doesn’t tell us:
Who are these people? Where are they? What was happening? What do you remember? Why this photograph, when hundreds of others have slipped into drawers or the forgotten albums of your phone?

You don’t need beautifully written recollections; that is the writer’s job.
What matters are the details only you know. A few memories, observations, anecdotes and fragments can become the raw material from which an entirely original piece of prose emerges.

From picture to prose

This is the idea at the heart of every Lyrical Pictogram.

A Lyrical Pictogram is a bespoke literary artwork created from a treasured photograph and the memories surrounding it, written entirely for one person.

You choose the photograph and share the memories behind it. Those fragments become the inspiration for an original piece of prose; not a description of what can be seen, but an imaginative response to the people, relationships and story beyond the image.

The result is something that did not exist before. And because it belongs to one particular photograph and one particular constellation of memories, it could not have been created for anyone else. Unique and unrepeatable.

A portrait in prose

We are accustomed to seeing commissioned portraits in paint, pencil, photography or sculpture. But portraiture need not belong solely to the visual arts.

Words can make portraits too.

They can capture character, humour, tenderness, eccentricity and atmosphere. They can evoke a moment while reaching backwards into what came before it and forwards into everything that followed.

A personalised story becomes something different from a conventional personalised gift. It becomes a portrait in prose; a painting in words.

What occasions suit a personalised story?

Perhaps the more interesting question is: what occasion doesn’t?

An anniversary can become the story of a relationship.
A milestone birthday can celebrate the person behind the number.
A wedding can capture the beginning of one chapter while honouring everything that led to it.
Christmas offers the chance to give something that could never be selected from a shelf.

And sometimes there needn’t be an occasion at all.
Some people deserve recording simply because they are there.

Giving somebody something that exists nowhere else

Personalisation is everywhere: names engraved, photographs printed, messages added.

There is nothing wrong with that. But there is a difference between putting someone’s name onto something that already exists and creating something that exists because of them. A story inspired by someone’s photograph and memories belongs firmly in the latter category. It cannot be duplicated for somebody else because somebody else did not live those moments.

We spend our lives accumulating possessions. What we truly treasure are the stories attached to them.

A Lyrical Pictogram

Turn a treasured photograph — and the memories behind it — into an entirely original piece of literature, created for one person and one person alone.

This is one of my most treasured photographs. As you can see it shows two well-dressed ladies and a little boy on their way to church. What the memory reveals is that I am that little boy with golden hair, holding my mother’s hand as we escort the wife to the Archbishop of York to the 14th Century church of St.Nicholas for my father’s induction as vicar to the Parish of Withernsea & Owthorne, circa 1974, along with the many colourful tales I could add to that.