Celebrate Nonfiction

Exploring the Joy of Nonfiction Reading and Writing

In the Classroom: Choosing Photos for Nonfiction Projects

Back
in October, I wrote this post about
the importance of visuals in nonfiction writing and described an activity
students can do to model how authors and illustrators make sure that the artwork
in a nonfiction book is accurate.

With Sarah Albee (right) at nErDcamp LI
Because
people liked that post so much, I thought I’d talk to my friend Sarah Albee about ways students can
model the process she uses to find photos for the books she writes. After all,
photos can enhance any kind of nonfiction report or project.

MS: Thanks
for taking the time to talk to me about how you get the images that appear in
your books. Do you just cut and paste photos from the internet?

SA: Hey Melissa! Happy
to be here!

No
way do I cut and paste photos from the internet. That would be unfair to the
photographer, and also illegal. I need to find out who owns the rights to every
image I use.

Some
images are in the public domain. That means they aren’t copyrighted and anyone
can use them free of charge. Most images published in the
U.S. before 1923 are in the public domain. Some more recent images are too, but
I have to do some research to find out.

MS: About
what percentage of the photos you use are in the public domain?

SA: For both my books and
my blog, about 80 percent. That’s because I’m writing about history. Many of
the images I need are pre-1923. The percentage would be lower if I were writing
about science.

MS: If an image isn’t in the public domain, what do you do?

SA: Most of the time I buy it from a photo stock house—a
company that sells the rights to use images taken by many different
photographers. Some of the money goes to the photo stock house and the rest
goes to the photographer.

Once
in a while, when I see a picture I want online of a hard-to-find image, I track
down the photographer myself. For my upcoming book Poison: Deadly Deeds, Perilous Professions, and
Murderous Medicines (Crown, 2017), I needed a picture of a venomous
snail called Conus magus. I spotted a
photograph of one in this NPR story.
But NPR didn’t own the rights to the photo. See the photo credit below the
picture?

I
tracked down the people credited and emailed them. It took a while, but I
finally heard back. The photographers gave me permission and sent me a
high-quality version of the image.

MS: Wow,
that sounds like a lot of work!

SA: It can be a tedious, time-consuming
process, but it’s important to me that my books include the best possible
photos.

MS: How
could teachers have students model your process in the classroom—so that they
learn to respect copyright law at an early age?

SA: After explaining the
importance of using images legally, a teacher could give her class a list of websites
with photos that are solidly public domain and recommend that the students use only
those sites to find photos. This list from the edtechteacher website is a
good place to start.

MS: Let’s say a student is doing a report on frogs and wants to
include a photo of a poison dart frog. What would he or she do?

SA: Wikimedia Commons would be a good source for this kind
of image. The student would go to
the website and type “poison dart frog” in the search box in the top right corner
of the screen. Here are the results of that search:

 

Then the student would click on the image he
or she liked to get more information:

 

The description at the bottom tells us the
name of the frog, where and when the image was taken, and the name of the
photographer. It also verifies that the image is in the public domain. Students
should give the photographer credit in their report. They can use the photo
credit section in any photo-illustrated book as a model.

MS: Thanks
for this great information, Sarah. It will really help teachers show their
students the right way to choose images.

Disclaimer from
Sarah:
I am not a copyright attorney. Copyright law is full of ambiguity. The
information I’ve shared is what I believe to be correct. Please feel free to
comment if you see something that you think is inaccurate.

3 Responses

  2. These articles are so good, that I don't want to miss any of them, but they keep coming to my yahoo account instead of my gmail account. My gmail account is .
    How do I get this site to recognize this new email I am using now.
    Thank you for your help.

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