Songfacts®:

• Take a picture... it will last longer.
  
  Verve Pipe lead singer Brian Vander Ark wrote this song, where he offers himself up in photographic form. In a Songfacts interview with Vander Ark, he explained: "The idea behind the lyric was that you can freeze me in some way and I will stay that way for you forever. And meanwhile, I'm doing so many other things, and whether they're good things or bad things, your perception of my life is confined in that photograph."
• This was released to radio as the first single from The Verve Pipe's 1996 album Villains, but in an effort to boost album sales, it wasn't available for sale. A few radio stations played it and the song rose to #53 on the Airplay chart (it was ineligible for the Hot 100 because you couldn't buy the single), but it did little to shift units of the album. The breakthrough came the following year when a new version of "The Freshman," a song originally released in 1992 and included on Villains, was released as a traditional single in 1997. That one took off, reaching #5 on the Hot 100 and pushing the album to over 1 million in sales. Many fans preferred "Photograph," but "The Freshman" was the hit.
• The video was directed by Lawrence Carroll, who also did Jewel's "You Were Meant For Me" and Counting Crows' "A Long December." It has a very '90s look, with white flashes, sepia and brooding. Vander Ark told us about one idea came in for the clip: "We had a video treatment that came in for that that was pretty funny. The band was going to be in Chinatown and we were going to come out of a factory down conveyor belts, each of us frozen in coffins and ice. Then when we reach the bottom, Chinese women come out to chop us out. We didn't choose that one, but conceptually that was pretty much what it was. The video director who wrote the treatment really got what the song was about."