We live in a visual world. We are surrounded by increasingly sophisticated visual images. But unless we are taught how to read them, we run the risk of remaining visually illiterate. This is something that none of us can afford in the modern world.

During our lives, we are usually taught how to read the printed word. We are shown how sentences are made up of grammatical units, how authors go on to use a whole cornucopia of grammatical devices to get their meaning across, and how meaning is both created and communicated at a remarkably sophisticated level. We learn how to read as well as write. Things are much less straightforward in the visual world. Often, we are left on our own when it comes to figuring out what a visual image means.

That is what this book is about. This is a book that explores how meaning is both made and transmitted in the visual world. It seeks not simple solutions – answers – to particular and individual images. Rather, it aims to show us ways of looking for ourselves so that we will be able to tackle any visual text – whether it is a drawing, a painting, a photograph, a film, an advertisement, a television programme or a new media text – and be able to start getting to grips with both what it means and how that meaning is communicated. We will discover, even, how some images give away far more in meaning than their authors ever consciously intended.

These comparisons between visual images and printed text are quite deliberate because we will discover how ‘visual texts’ can be ‘read’ with just the same rigour – and with just the same reward – as the printed word. We really can get to work on them – to wrestle with them, almost – to begin to discover both how and what they mean. And just as with the printed word, it is best if we begin with deliberate strategies for analysis if we want to get a text to unlock its secrets as revealingly as possible.

In the chapters that follow, we will make our way through some classic theories of visual analysis. The aim is to explain each one as clearly as possible, while at the same time showing its benefits and disadvantages. We will discover that some will be far more useful than others – but not all in the same way. By the end of the book, we should be able to select each method (or methods) as appropriate for the task in hand, just as we would choose the right tool from the box for a particular hands-on job. This book, therefore, aims to bring all the useful approaches together in one volume, unifying them under a broad overall strategy.

Do not be afraid of the word ‘theory’. Yes, it can sound dauntingly abstract at times, and in the hands of some writers can appear to have precious little to do with the actual, visual world around us. Good theory, however, is an awesome thing. Just like a skeleton key, it is remarkable both in itself and also (and equally) in what it can do for us: it opens up all manner of things. But unless we actually use it, it borders on the metaphysical and might as well not be used at all. That is why in this book we will always be looking at examples; combining the theory of method with the practice of looking. It also explains why this book is divided into two parts, concentrating first on particular theories and then on specific media. It is designed to introduce us not only to methods we can think about, but methods that we can also actually use.

Those of us who are already creatively involved in the visual arts, or are planning a professional career in the media or communications industries, will need little convincing of the need for visual literacy. Creatively, we need to be able to ‘read’ as well as ‘write’, to learn how others have communicated visually in order, in turn, to learn from them. Further, we need to know how others will read our work, be they consumers, clients or critics. We need to be practically accomplished in these skills in order to make a living from them.

Visual literacy, however, should not be limited to those with a creative or professional interest in visual culture. On the contrary, the need is much more widespread. So much of today’s culture is visual that we all need to be visually literate in order to function coherently in the contemporary world. Today, for example, more of us get our news, current affairs and information from television than from the newspapers. Television, it need hardly be said, is an essentially visual medium that communicates primarily though pictures. Think of recent world events and you probably think televisually: the open-topped limousines of the Kennedy motorcade in Dallas, the wide-eyed famine victims in Ethiopia, the bifurcating vapour trails of the exploding Challenger space shuttle, the funeral cortege of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the explosion of flame as a hijacked airliner slices into the World Trade Center.

Television is constructed around pictures. Television producers know this, and so do politicians. When they seek to persuade, they usually do so televisually. This was something that was first grasped in 1960 when American presidential campaigners first began properly to exploit the new medium. Some 100 million Americans watched a then novel series of debates between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy. Kennedy looked better on television; most viewers thought he had won the debates and there is no doubt that he won the election.

It may seem strange to us today that there was anything remarkable about this. That elections are fought on TV is something we nowadays take for granted. It is not just the formality of debates, or the increasingly expensive and slickly produced election broadcasts. Candidates (and their teams of media handlers) are also aware of the importance of prime-time, editorially covered photo opportunities which compete for space in the evening news. A well-organized visual not only gets selected for broadcast; it can also encapsulate just the message the media gurus wish to get across.

Of course, it doesn’t always work. Democratic presidential candidate Michael S. Dukakis tried to toughen up his image by riding around in a tank for publicity pictures during the campaign of 1988. Unfortunately, voters thought he looked ridiculous in an overly large military helmet with straps flying like the floppy ears of a cartoon character. He lost. In Britain, Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock tried in 1983 to emulate the Kennedy style by strolling, casually, along the edge of the beach. Unfortunately, the television audience only saw him slip and stumble into the water. The image dogged him, and he never became prime minister. For better or worse, visual culture is very much a part of the democratic process.¹

International conflict is similarly entwined with the visual world. Long before photography, it was usual for artists to paint battles – usually to the gratification of the winning side. Later, official war artists would sketch or paint on location, and then their work would be engraved for newspaper reproduction. With photojournalism, people began to see what war actually looked like for the first time. Particular images began to take on iconic significance. A group of US marines raising the flag over Iwo Jima, for example, remains one of the abiding images of the Second World War, while a (then) unknown girl running burned, scared and naked down a Vietnamese road speaks with equal eloquence of the conflict in Indochina. We can probably all ‘replay’ such images in our minds as we read this; images that somehow concentrate so many feelings about the conflicts they represent. It is a cliché, of course, that a picture is worth a thousand words, but the trouble with clichés is that they are so often true. One of the wonders of pictures, however, as we will see especially in chapter 2, is that they can often take over where words are not enough.

The Gulf War of 1991 broke new ground: not only were images available live to audiences around the world, but pictures were concurrently available from both sides of the conflict. Both parties were seeking international public approval not only for their causes but also for their pursuit of those causes. The Western allies, for example, showed footage of ‘precision bombing’ with a missile finding its target via an enemy chimney (again, many of us can ‘replay’ this footage in our heads), while the Iraqis responded with sequences of civilian casualties. It was a sequence played out again with the aerial attacks on Afghanistan, beginning in 2001.

The Kosovo crisis of 1999 was, similarly, a battle for international hearts and minds – in addition, of course, to being a painful military conflict for those directly involved. The propaganda battle was, again, fought visually. Yet, while the military authorities had exploited the advantages of waging war visually in the Gulf, in Kosovo they found themselves on the receiving end of a media and a public now used to images of conflict. British television journalist Peter Snow, sceptical of allied claims of Serbian atrocities, was therefore able to demand of an increasingly uncomfortable NATO spokesperson: ‘Where are the pictures? Show us the pictures!’ Visual culture, in other words, had reached such a phase that the word of a NATO official was no longer good enough for the British media. The media wanted proof; the media wanted pictures.²

The pictures that depict our world are not necessarily moving pictures, despite the pre-eminence of television, cinema and related media. Newspaper and magazine photographs remain important, and have a ‘fixity’ that gives them more staying power than a fleeting, moving image. Just as in television, however, the images are by no means secondary to the words. Newspaper editors know this: the lead picture will always be above the front-page fold so that it attracts our attention on the news-stand. One hardly needs to stress the importance of the cover photograph of a magazine, no matter how fashionable or weighty its content.

Visual images, however, are by no means limited to the news media. They surround us every day in advertising, on packaging, on banknotes and on CD covers. They all have something to say, whether they are as informal as family snapshots or as imposing as art gallery canvases.

Try to imagine a world without visual culture. It is impossible. If we doubt this, we should just try closing our eyes for half an hour, or (on the other hand) walking down the street making a mental note of every form of visual communication that we see. Imagine, next, the same brief walk without the visual images. Visual culture, then, is not limited to museums and cable television. It has a part to play in decisions as important as whom we elect to govern us, and as seemingly trivial as which cereal we will choose for breakfast. If we are unable to read visual culture, we are at the mercy of those who write it on our behalf.

Let us return, then, to the concept of visual literacy. If we are presented with a piece of printed text, we can easily begin to get to work on it. We can note its content, style and structure. We can spot the literary and rhetorical devices used to present us with an argument, to persuade us of the writer’s point of view. We read such texts critically. If it is a contract, we look for the small print. If it is a sales pitch, we look for the ‘weasel words’, such as ‘a chance to win’ or ‘savings of up to 50%’. We ask, quite rightly, what is really being offered. We look for what is left out as much as what is included. We ask who is the author of a particular text, and how that may influence what they are trying to say.

We may of course differ on the meaning of a text. Anyone who has read T. S. Eliot, Shakespeare or scripture will understand this. Our disagreements, however, will be based upon a searching and sophisticated analysis of the words, together with all manner of reference to and quotation from the texts themselves. This is something at which we are all pretty good, at which we have had instruction, and with which we still get a lot of practice. How many of us, however, can apply the same logic, rigour and analysis to visual as to ‘verbal’ text?

It is important to stress here that this does not mean we should abandon verbal or literary analysis in favour of the visual. Despite the pre-eminence of visual communication today, we still need words and we still need to know how to read them in both the narrowest and the widest sense. We can see also how many of today’s new media texts (more of which in the final chapter) combine the visual with the verbal in order to get multilayered messages across. We need, therefore, to take both seriously. But it is to the visual that we need to pay remedial attention.

This introduction began with a deliberately provocative claim about visual illiteracy. Surely, we may respond, we are all perfectly visually literate in our increasingly visual world. The point is that we are not. Certainly, we are practised and experienced viewers of contemporary visual texts, but so much of this experience is grounded in habit rather than analysis. We are all too often complacent and accept visual literacy as a passive rather than an active pursuit. We take too much for granted, and (consequently) leave too much unseen. Instead of simply ploughing on with the job of reading, then, we need much more actively to think about how we read, and whether we ought to be reading differently. Bringing some sort of structure and self-awareness to this process is a very good place to start.

The visual world is not only a modern world. In returning to visual literacy, we are in many ways rediscovering the skills that our cultural predecessors knew better. Five centuries ago, for example, Western Europeans would have been able instantly to recognize each other’s precise social standing from the ordered detail of their dress, and they would, at the same time, have been able to interpret religious painting with an acuity that would put contemporary students to shame. In North America, native tribes would have recognized each other from the significant minutiae of their art and ritual objects, each rich with meaning that today would be dismissed, by the uninitiated, as mere patterns or designs. We need to remember, always, that the printed word is, culturally, a very recent phenomenon. It is a crucially important one, of course, but it needs again to be emphasized that visual literacy has a long and substantial tradition which historically overshadows much more recent kinds of ‘reading’. As Gyorgy Kepes argued in Education of Vision back in 1965, ‘We have to get back to our roots … we have to re-educate our vision.’³

This book will begin with six chapters on strategies for the analysis of visual texts. They will show us, in other words, six different ways of looking. The first chapter will concentrate on looking at the content of a work of art. We will study the practice of iconology, using an intriguing fifteenth-century wedding portrait as our first example and, to show that iconology is not limited to the past, a famous Beatles CD cover.

For the second chapter, we will move on to a way of looking which concentrates on the form rather than the content of a visual text. We will take as our examples two challenging paintings by American abstract artists – artists whose troubled lives were eloquently reflected in their work.

If anyone thought that this book was going to be all about art history, they would be surprised to discover that the traditional history of art gets only one chapter here, and this third one is it. We will look at a passionate painting by Picasso and a controversial portrait by Rembrandt (but is it?) to help us explore both the usefulness and the limits of art history in reading a visual text.

In angry contrast to the art historical approach, more recent theorists have provoked traditionalists by interpreting treasured works of art ideologically, claiming that such texts reveal entrenched societal attitudes about class, race, gender and wealth. In chapter 4, we will begin by looking at one of the most controversial writers in this area, contrasting his views with those of a direct opponent. The battleground will be two famous paintings from the Dutch golden age. We will then extend the discussion by examining a gender-based approach to the study of film and finally a sociological model of the circumstances in which cultural texts are produced.

In the fifth chapter, we will unravel the seemingly complicated study of semiotics and show how this can provide an extremely useful way of looking at popular culture. We will see how this approach reveals both the intended and unintended messages of advertising.

Part I concludes with a call for an interpretive and multilayered approach to the discovery of meaning in visual texts. We will consider the extent to which we can ever really isolate ‘the’ meaning, and close this sixth chapter by asking provocative questions about the meaning of culture as a whole.

The second part of this book shifts the focus from general theories to the analysis of specific media forms. It is a section that is, however, underlined by a continuing theoretical question: what is the relationship of visual culture both to reality and to the wider culture that it purports to represent?

We begin Part II with a chapter that examines drawing, printmaking and painting. It wonders how we learn to draw and paint, and discusses how much of what we take to be ‘realistic’ is simply a matter of learned convention. It asks how much the traditional fine arts use artifice in pursuit of the illusion of reality. As a case study, we think back to the childish drawings of our youth.

Chapter 8 takes a close look at photography and wonders whether it is a ‘realistic’ medium which can also be described as an ‘art’ form. It ponders the role of subjectivity and authorship in photography, and asks whether the camera produces images that are as dispassionate and objective as at first they may appear. Dorothea Lange’s Great Depression photograph of a migrant mother provides a first-class example.

From photography we progress to film. In the ninth chapter we discover that film, just like literature, comprises a variety of codes, forms and narrative structures. Unlike its close relation the theatre, however, it is able to transcend both time and space. Using the example of Stanley Kubrick’s classic movie The Shining, we discover that cinema is much more than simply pictures that move.

Television, the subject of chapter 10, is a medium we all spend a great deal of time watching, but which also tells us a great deal about ourselves. We must learn, however, that television is not a direct, literal reflection of our daily lives. Family comedy The Cosby Show provides a telling example.

Our final chapter comes up to date with new media. Video, DVD, multimedia, CGI and a whole host of other computer and digital technologies have brought about changes that would have staggered the old masters of the Renaissance, with whom we begin this study. One wonders whatever they would have made of Facebook. We use examples of World Wide Web pages and an Aerosmith music video to illustrate the theory. But when it all comes down to it, how much has really changed? Do these new media demand new analytic strategies? Do they present new challenges to our assumptions about reality, representation and visual culture?

There is both a progression and a symmetry, then, about this book. We begin with the study of relatively simple, fixed and two-dimensional texts and progress to a discussion of complex, multimedia forms. We consider increasingly sophisticated analytical strategies as part of that progression. We conclude by standing at the edge of the increasingly expanding new media frontier and looking back at how much has changed and yet how much has remained constant in our visual world.

Along the way, we will be introduced to some classic writers and writings on visual analysis. The aim is to get back to basics; to engage with the seminal texts on particular approaches. We will see what these authorities – who are too often nowadays referred to only in passing – actually had to say. By starting at the beginning, we will concentrate on the fundamental arguments for particular approaches rather than overwhelm ourselves with later and more sophisticated developments of them. Groundings, after all, should begin on the ground.

Each chapter begins with a ‘text box’, which contains a concise overview of what the chapter is about and the information it contains. It is aimed to help you get your bearings before we jump into a detailed and sometimes narrative account of a developing theory or approach. At the end of each chapter, you will then find a Key Debates section, which builds upon the previous, explicatory material by asking somewhat more advanced questions – with much less scope for easy agreement. We close each chapter by suggesting further readings so that, primed with the basics, you can use what we have written as setting-off points to further study for yourself. The aim here is not to précis everything that has ever been said on visual analysis. Rather, it seeks to introduce some fundamental ways of thinking about the visual world.

If we live in a visual world, learning to be visually literate is not a luxury but a necessity. This book seeks simply to begin to open our eyes.