Analysing visual texts
VISUAL LITERACY
Visual literacy is the ability to
deconstruct images in various contexts for particular purposes using
the appropriate language and theoretical tools.
A
postmodern approach to visual literacy rejects the distinction between
high art high and popular images and art forms. Postmodern style is
often characterized by eclecticism, collage, pastiche and irony.
Below is a table which contains the language and tools for analysis of visual texts:
Representational Meanings
| Interactive Meanings
| Compositional Meanings
|
Colours - are the colours used within the text symbolic? e.g. Red - passion, anger, fire, all things intense and passionate
| Image, act, gaze
| Information - value - distance |
| Represented participants (Who/what?) | Framing, social distance
| Salience (What do you see first?)
|
| Transactional processes (Who/what?) | Power, status (angles)
| Positioning - Left/right/top/bottom/centre margin
|
| Reactional processes (Who is reacting and how?) | Modality (real>idealised>abstract)
| Framing - Strong, weak, isolating, inclusive
|
| Vectors (lines within the image - that create reading paths) | Colour scales and brightness (satuation)
| Text - Font, positioning, size
|
| Symbolism | Levels of illumination
|
|
| Shapes | Background (contextualised, non-contexualised)
|
|
When you start analysing visual texts two questions should begin your analysis
What is the salient image?
How are the vectors within the image
used to frame the subject of the text? (Click on the link to VisLit scaffold which provides an framework for analysing visual images.)
Activity 7 Write a brief reflective piece
of a search, or treasure hunt, you've undertaken. This can be a real, virtual or imagined
search and should take the form of a journal entry.
| The television frames the curious boy and the objects rejected in the dump of civilisation | 
| The view from inside the frame of the television shows the boy framed by shadows...(consider symbolic implications of shadow/darkness). |
Apart from looking closely at the images, within a text, there are several other aspects of visual images that require analysis. Visit the resources page and check out the visual literacy glossary and scaffold created for analysing visual texts.
| The images from the dump surround the boy. They include historical artefacts, religious iconography, social, technological, scientific and cultural artefacts.
|
Meaning is made in visual texts because represented
participants (the who and the what in the image) are connected and
interact. Postmodernism texts often include historical (documentary) reference, and the appropriation of popular media.
Within a text there are three different types of meaning representational meaning, interactive meaning , compositional meaning.
See if you can guess what each of these types of meaning include!
