civilized ku # 174 ~ what you see isn't always what you get
Monday, June 15, 2009 at 09:24AM 
Bringing the outside inside • click to embiggen"Literacy" has always been understood first and foremost to mean the ability to read (and write). As associated with the word "literate", it also implies "educated". One could also say that a fundamental point of the process of getting educated is to become literate. One can also be said to be literate, as in having knowledge or skill in a specified field - a field not necessarily associated with reading and writing. Such as, he is very literate in computer usage.
What the word is not often associated with is pictures, especially so in the realm of general education. Sure, at institutions of higher learning - college, university, et al - there are specialized courses in what might be called visual literacy, but the fact remains that, for most people, a picture is just a picture. The exception to that is the personal snapshot of a loved one (to include animals) or even a beloved place (the old homestead, et al).
However, when confronted with a picture of, say, a plate of eggs and bacon on a greasy-spoon booth's formica table top, virtually all of the visually illiterate will struggle, assuming that they even try, to come up with any meaning beyond the obvious. It's just a picture of a plate of eggs.
The idea of visual illiteracy is not by any means a new concept. Take this as an example:
The illiteracy of the future will be ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography. - Anonymous - cited in: “Germany - The New Photography 1927 – 33
And, at some point in time after that statement was put forth, this one was also offer up:
I think a photography class should be a requirement in all educational programs because it makes you see the world rather than just look at it. - Author unknown
To cut right to the chase, it seems to me that both of these statements have their genesis in the phrase, "more than meets the eye", and furthermore, that most are not very good at visually "reading between the lines". Or, to be more accurate when speaking of pictures, "seeing beneath the surface" of things.
Again, cutting to the chase relative to my point in bringing this up, our current economic crisis (at least from the consumer debt POV) is due to the fact that so many of us bought into, literally and figuratively, the pictures of the "good life" as offered for view by those who stood to gain the most from the embrace of that idea of the "good life" - the business class purveyors of that concept of the "good life".
In short, advertising / marketing pictures (and related visual media representations) as pure propaganda for a false notion of the "good life" - that is to say say a life predicated on spent-and-get, no matter the consequences to personal financial security, the planet / environment, the cultural / societal implications of self-centered aggrandizement, and so on.
I can't help but wonder where we might be if only we were more visually literate.
Reader Comments (2)
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I generally agree with your post, but wanted to add one other thought. Many (most?) photographers aren't visually literate either, which means that a picture of a plate of eggs usually is just that.
Folks who take photos of common objects often seem to ascribe meaning after the fact because it makes them feel artistic. If others "don't get it," the photographer can easily justify the lack of quality interpretation. Surely it's just another sign that the unwashed masses have lost the ability to read between the lines (which they have, of course, but so has the average photographer).