Visual Literacy and Visual Culture

Familiarity with specific images or sets of images plays a role in a culture's visual heritage. Two questions can be asked about this type of visual literacy: Is this a type of knowledge that is worth building into the formal educational curriculum of our schools? What are the educational implications of visual literacy? There is a three-part educational rationale to these questions. First, knowing about the conventional implications of certain images might make viewers more resistant to the manipulative uses of those images in advertisements or other contexts. Second, specific images, primarily photographs, have been intimately intertwined with the social developments from which they emerged that the teaching of history seems almost inconceivable without some reference to these images. Third, there are some images about which one might want to instruct younger generations because of the role they have played as a reference point in the public life of older generations. Students were informally tested on their familiarity with a number of historical photographs, pictures from ads, and some frequently parodied images. The highest rate of recognition was of the advertising images, followed by the visual parodies, and then the historical images. The results give a sense of the potential for education to raise students' levels of visual literacy, and draws attention to the need for further exploration of the implications of visual literacy. (DGM)