Picture This: Visual Literacy Activities

"All of us are watchers - of television, of time clocks, of traffic on the freeway - but few of us are observers. Everyone is looking, not many are seeing."
- Peter M. Leschak

Why is visual literacy important?
Photography and history
Why utilize source material such as photographs?

We live in an increasingly visual culture. We are surrounded by images everywhere in our lives. By looking at and studying photographs with your students, you will help them better understand the complexities of their world.

Visual literacy is defined as the ability to understand communications composed of visual images as well as being able to use visual imagery to communicate to others. Students become visually literate by the practice of visual encoding (expressing their thoughts and ideas in visual form) and visual decoding (translating and understanding the meaning of visual imagery).

It is important that students learn to recognize and understand the often-complex messages of photographic images. Consistent with this goal, this website provides students with tools needed to critically examine their visual world.

By participating in Picture This activities, your
students will:

"The image survives the subject and becomes the remembered reality." - John Szarkowski (Director of Photography Department, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1962 - 1991)

As is alluded to in the quote above, photography is a powerful medium that greatly influences our interpretation of past events and our understanding of history. Most people become familiar with historical events through documentary photography reproduced in newspapers and books. We often learn about events after they occur and depend on photography to tell us stories about the past.

Given that photography influences how we think about history, we should all be aware that photographs are not simply objective records of people, places, and events. Rather, each photograph is a highly edited production, and is created by a person who has unique opinions and views about the world. These viewpoints influence the types of images the photographer creates. In turn, our life experiences and personal opinions influence how we understand and "read" photographs.

By participating in the activities listed here, your students will gain a greater understanding of the various ways photography functions and influences how we think about history. Your students will explore and contemplate how a photographer's own point of view comes into play in the images that he or she creates and how we each interpret photographs differently, depending on our own life experience.

By utilizing primary source material in your curriculum, you expose your students to artifacts from the past that are authentic and make history come alive. Students enjoy seeing objects from the period they are studying. The National Archives states that primary sources "fascinate students because they are real and they are personal: history is humanized through them."

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