Suppl_eMINTS

Why Visual Literacy?

To many of us, “literacy” has always meant reading and writing, but it means so much more.  Literacy is how we read or create almost any form of communication.  There is literacy in understanding a friend’s emotional state or interpreting a great piece of art.  Literacy is not confined to the written word, and neither is illiteracy.

My partner, who is a college professor at Mizzou in English and Gender & Women’s Studies, focuses much of her work on images.  She is a rhetorician, specifically, who looks at how images are used to make arguments.  Often times, she assigns students images to read or alter in order to make their own meaning.  Visual literacy is a definite reality at the college level, and if we are preparing our students for college, we must include visual literacy.

One of the most discussed examples of visual literacy has revolved around the photographs in National Geographic.  Often times, NG uses images to convey a sense of exoticism even though the accompanying articles have little to do with the photos.

One example of this use of an image to demonstrate the exotic is found in Steve McCurry’s picture of the Afghan girl (seen below).  The photo provides a sense of wonder as to the life of this wild-eyed girl in a strange, war-torn land.  The topic is both intriguing and problematic.  It is intriguing in that NG uses images like this over and over to give their readers a sense that the publication opens the reader to strange, new worlds of exotic beauty and wonder.  It is problematic in that the images are of real people with real histories and issues that stretch far beyond these depictions and should not be limited to the perceptions of the publisher and reader.  In other words, it’s very complicated.  We need to prepare our students for these complexities in society.  We need to make our students visually literate.