Picture This Volume 2

Photographs have a unique ability to stimulate the imagination, memory and emotions. For two decades, Picture This has provided people around the world with an evocative invitation to share stories, spark meaningful conversations, and reflect on their lives and relationships.

Over the years we’ve had fabulous feedback from educators, counsellors, human service workers and other professionals, about how much they love the cards and what they’d like to see in a new volume of photographic images.

With Picture This Volume 2 we’ve delivered! More diversity, more inclusivity, and more powerful catalysts for storytelling and breaking down barriers of culture, language and literacy.

To make this happen we’ve enlisted the talents of Walkley Award winning photojournalist, Brendan McCarthy—a true storyteller in images. The result is an eclectic, but ultimately cohesive, collection of 40 photographs that cover a stunningly broad range of subject matter and metaphor … from the everyday and whimsical, to the deeply challenging, imaginative and truly joyful.

Mix and match volume 2 with the original Picture This to create a strengths-based tool of 115 powerful images—giving you the opportunity to curate and collate your own collections to best suit the groups, or individual people, you support.

If you already use the original Picture This in your work, then volume 2 is an absolute must for your strengths-based toolkit. If you’re new to Picture This , you’ll want to purchase both sets as a bundle. Like so many who have discovered the power of photographs, it will be a resource you turn to again and again.

Contents:

• 40 laminated, full-colour cards (185mm x 140mm) in a sturdy folio box
• BONUS: Free access to the Picture This Volume 2 Digital Toolbox
• Digital version of the cards and a digital booklet full of ideas for using the cards
• Extra support resources including ideas bank, card hacks and blogs

How to use:

• In counselling or group work: Invite participants to choose photos that reflect their stories, strengths, or challenges.
• In schools: Spark creative writing, art projects, or reflective storytelling.
• In workshops and teams: Use as icebreakers, prompts for values-based discussions, or pathways to shared understanding.
• For personal reflection: Explore themes of change, identity, and perspective.

Brendan McCarthy is a professional photographer and photojournalist who has worked in the media for more than two decades. His photographs have appeared in Lonely Planet Guidebooks, The Age, Qantas’s in-flight magazine The Australian Way, Denmark’s Jyllends Posten, Fairfax Community Newspapers and The Bendigo Advertiser.

He jumped at the chance to collaborate on a project that has storytelling at its heart.

‘My work as a photojournalist is all about revealing the lives of the quiet people,’ he says. ‘Telling the stories of those who might not otherwise be heard. It is a privilege, and often an inspiration.’