Most professionals spend large chunks of their lives at work, but they rarely have photographs of themselves at the office. Beyond recording this key backdrop of individual lives, photos can be an important part of organizational history. Consider the iconic 1978 photo (below)of Microsoft’s first employees: It exists only because a member of the group won a session with a local portrait photographer and decided to include coworkers in the shoot. Now it’s ensconced in tech start-up lore.
A version of this article appeared in the January–February 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review.