Perhaps the most famous appearance of embedded photographs in a novel of the last half-century came in Timothy Findley’s The Wars, in which Findley used striking photos to introduce an anchor of authenticity to a story that exposed the distance between constructed narrative and historical reality.
Riggs is far from the first novelist to recognize the story-supporting power of real photographs. For Riggs, these inscriptions bring faded images into focus an otherwise-dull photo becomes “a scene imbued with pathos and drama, the strength of which has little to do with composition or tone or even, really, the subject of the photo itself.” Riggs’ fascination with other people’s discarded photos often derives not from a photo itself but from the context suggested by a few revealing words scrawled on the back. In the introduction to Talking Pictures: Images and Messages from the Past, Ransom Riggs explains how he came by his habit of frequenting flea markets to collect some of the mystifying “found photographs” that populate his best-selling novel, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.
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