Preface
The aim of this book is to encourage and guide the development of visual literacy in writers. The practical advantages of developing these skills are obvious: the ability to describe art and film in a way that shows knowledge of how they are constructed is a useful tool for academics, journalists, and the socially agile alike. But I hold a deeper conviction than just an awareness of the usefulness of these skills. I believe that the challenge of translating the visual language of images into words is such a powerful and difficult task – when you get into it – that it can greatly benefit the development of academic writing in anyone willing to explore it deeply, not just those concerned with writing about visual culture specifically.
We should all be visually literate. Many aspects of the specific nature of life and art in the twenty-first century can be explained in terms of how rapidly images can be created and transmitted now as opposed to thirty years ago. This proliferation of images affects the daily substance of most people’s lives as powerfully as writing once did, from the videos we see on our phones first thing in the morning to the memes and birthday messages we share online, to the dating profiles made and deleted and the bus stop video screens we pass every day on the way to work. Often the most successful words are those accompanied by or made into images, while many of the most important images are provocations for important words and actions. It is a commonplace idea that images are as powerful as words in our time; we might then begin to wonder about developing intellectual armor that can protect us from them being used to overwhelm us, as some intend for them to do.
Whether images really have taken primacy over words in the political, financial, artistic, and social worlds is open for debate, but words remain a powerful tool: they are still mostly the way we process, critique, control, and alter the course of what I’ll refer to in this book as our “image world”. This book suggests that the task of becoming a visually-literate writer, capable of understanding attempts by images to coerce and manipulate us, is part of our responsibility to make ourselves informed citizens and voters. Visual literacy is rhetorical analysis, but the rhetoric belongs not to essay writers or public speakers but to the image makers, the unseen speakers behind the creations that dominate our imaginations and shape our lived realities.
This book reflects the belief that visual literacy can bring whole new ways of seeing, that it can alter one’s daily experience of images, that it can activate parts of the brain that writing about other writing misses, and that it can teach a student a whole new language that enables a new way of looking. And, like all writing, learning to write about images involves reading a lot of writing too, so this book is intended to guide a student through some of the key writings on images of the past and present as models for their own explorations.
The first step to visual literacy is a simple one: saying what we see.
Overview
This book charts an unusual and idiosyncratic journey through the image world. It begins with Ekphrasis, a study of the way artists and critics have written about other art, particularly poets writing about paintings. These artists’ responses raise philosophical questions about what we think art is and does, especially in terms of the way artworks seem to have an “aura” and the way we often treat images as though they are “alive”.
The Aura section also introduces the concept of images having unique powers over our emotions and thoughts. In the modern world, these powers are, inevitably, used politically, so the following Aesthetics chapter introduces the concept of political images and their underlying logic. This chapter gives students a chance to consider the real risks that images pose as tools of manipulation through a case study of Nazi Germany.
Building on this exploration, the Branding chapter looks at the diverse strategies deployed by advertisers to change consumer behavior throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as the way we shape our identities through a relationship with brands and logos. Identity is then delved into more deeply in the chapter on Representation, which looks at the ways that images in mainstream media shape our social reality and the ways that cultural criticism can be used productively to respond to representations and misrepresentations.
This brings us all the way to the present day. In Networks, the book considers the ways that images circulate and mutate on and through the internet, exploring the internet as primarily a tool of mass image reproduction. The book closes by turning to look at the role of rapidly circulating images in our work and the economy, looking to the future of our lives surrounded by images designed to shock, change, surprise, and allure us.
Using Saying What We See
This book was designed as a tool for writing students and instructors as an Open Educational Resource. It is free to use and is intended to be explored on a chapter-by-chapter or a wholesale basis as part of a class for developing writers or by self-guided learners.
The book’s chapters are designed to introduce complex ideas in a simple and readable style, priming readers and writers for engagements with exciting and challenging material from philosophy, politics, art, literature, and journalism. Each chapter has suggested further reading to enable students to leap off on paths of discovery guided by their own interests, alongside exercises that may be completed alone or as part of a class assignment. There are also writing guides for longer essays that may be used as they are or adapted by teachers as needed.