Visual Literacy

This week we learned about visual literacy, which is the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in the form of an image. Just like a book, a picture can be read and analyzed. Many photographers capture an image to tell a story, express an emotion, or make a point. Being able to analyze pictures will help people throughout their lives, since our culture is very visual. People can learn to be visually literate by practicing visual encoding and visual decoding. Visual encoding allows people to learn by creating their own examples of visuals, like painting a picture, or taking a photograph. People learn through visual decoding when they try to understand and analyze other artists work. One of the videos we watched for class asked the question, “What if we were stripped of our visual literacy?” Every day, people are surrounded by visuals, like road signs, businesses logos, and more. If people did not know how to read a sign, how would they know to stop at a stop sign, or go into the men’s bathroom and not the ladies? Visual literacy is crucial for everyday life. Also discussed this week was the topic of photoshop. According to Wikipedia, “Photoshop is a graphics editing program,” that allows people to fix images on the computer. This could be good for many reasons, but it could also have a negative effect on society. Sometimes a photographer might have taken a dark picture and want to lighten it up, or they want to play around with the colors in the backgrounds, but some editors take it too far. In a video created by Dove, a models picture is completely changed and put up on a billboard for the world to see. They changed many aspects of her face, like making her eyes bigger, and her neck longer. At the end of the video they state, “no wonder our perception of beauty is distorted.” The people who created this video are trying to say that they way people are editing photos is taking away natural beauty, and making it fake. People are beautiful because they are different. There is no reason to fix a picture to take away acne, or bags under the eyes, or to make someone skinnier. 

This video shows how visual literacy is important to everyday life. A guy is walking around, looking at signs to help him find where he needs to go. Without knowing how to read signs he might get lost. Also, throughout the video, a lot of different examples of visuals are shown; diagrams, charts, instructions, pictures, signs, etc. All of these visuals are used daily, and being visually literate can help people read them better.

As an education major, it is very important that I learn how much visual literacy is needed in our lives. Students need to learn how to look at pictures in different ways, and be able to know what they are saying. Visuals are used all over the world, and just like learning how to read needs to be started at an early age, so does learning how to read pictures. Not only will my students know how to analyze a picture, they will be more capable of creating their own. Also, it is important for my students to know about Photoshop and how it can enhance a picture, and also destroy one. I want my children to know that they are perfect how they are, and Photoshop should not be used to fix any flaws they may see in their selves.