Visual Information Literacy: Reading a Documentary Photograph

Like a printed text, an architectural blueprint, a mathematical equation, or a musical score, a visual image is its own language. Visual literacy has three components: (1) learning; (2) thinking; and (3) communicating. A "literate" person is able to decipher the basic code and syntax, interpret the signs and symbols, correctly apply terms from an academic discipline or field of study, understand how things fit together, and do appropriate work. Visual "information" literacy is the ability to understand, evaluate, and use visual information. Just as reader response theory conceptualizes textual literacy in terms of an interaction between the text and the reader, a theory of visual literacy ought to take into account the transaction of the viewer with the image. To represent that relationship of the subject, the medium, the photographer, and the context with the viewer, the author modified the classical rhetorical stance to model the reading of a photograph. In this article, the author describes how to teach visual information literacy using documentary photographs. (Contains 1 table.)