Visual Literacy

Debates on visual culture are so common these days that it is high time to take this field seriously. If we receive our information through images, we need to learn how to “read” them. Education – at any level – should not be exclusively based on text. Visual literacy provides answers to the following questions, among others: How do images act and function? How do images make arguments and reflect? Closely related, what are the rhetorical strategies employed by those who commission and publish images?

As virtual space has enhanced and altered public space, visual spheres of action have also expanded. When religious terms such as faith and scepticism play a role in the digital use of images, it is important to keep in mind that true or false is not the only reception attitude towards images. Instead, the material and medial conditions enabling pictorial meaning need to be defined alongside the ways in which these conditions can be analysed.

Visual history and theory is a genuinely interdisciplinary science, still too weakly institutionalised in Germany. As art, the image is long since part of art history, as a medium in media studies, as a document in history, and as a social phenomenon in sociology. Yet these discourses operate independently rather than effectively working together on shared questions, methods, and concepts.

This is where image studies with a focus on visual literacy come in, working across disciplines. As an interdisciplinary, interuniversity institution, KWI is ideally positioned to organise and actively shape this discourse.

Contact: Anja Schürmann

All related events can be found here, and the blog series “Do You Have to Be Able to Read? Visual Literacy as a Space for Reflection” can be found here.