Most of us started reading with the help of picture books. Some of us moved on to comic books. Some of us moved on to graphic novels. All of us, it’s safe to say, have continued to read books that sometimes have pictures – photos or illustrations.

When we think of pictures in adult fiction, we tend to think of graphic novels with drawings. But fiction can also benefit from photos. An excellent example is Carol Shields’ Pulitzer Prize-winning The Stone Diaries. Shields cleverly employs photos and even a faux family tree to convince us of the reality of her fictional autobiography. While her writing paints vivid time, place and characters in the mind’s eye, the addition of photos solidifies her view for us.

Jack Finney, in Time and Again and its sequel, From Time to Time successfully uses illustrations and photos to enhance his stories. The promotional blurb on Time and Again calls the book “the classic illustrated novel”.

The concept of photos dates back at least as far as 1892 and Bruges-la-Morte by Belgian writer George Rodenbach, the first known work of fiction illustrated with photos . Since then, other notable novels employing photos include Orlando by Virginia Woolf and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

As more authors incorporate pictures in their fictional works, scholars are suggesting these books have their own genre. Suggested names for the genre include “iconotexts”, “image-texts”, “pictorial fiction”, “visual fiction” and the tripping-off-the-tongue “photography-embedded fiction”. Don’t worry what to call it … just picture it!