Visual Literacy

226 Pages·2007·4.76 MB·English

by  James Elkins (Ed.)

V L
ISUAL ITERACY

V L
ISUAL ITERACY
EDITED BY
James Elkins
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Visual literacy / edited by Jim Elkins.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-415-95810-3 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-0-415-95811-0 (pbk.) 1. Visual
literacy. 2. Visual communication. 3. Visual perception. I. Elkins, James, 1955-
LB1068.V567 2007
370.15’5--dc22 2007017432
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Contents
Preface vii
Introduction: Th e Concept of Visual Literacy,
and Its Limitations 1
JAMES ELKINS
1 Visual Literacy or Literary Visualcy? 11
W. J. T. MITCHELL
Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science 14
W. J. T. MITCHELL
2 Th e Remaining 10 Percent: Th e Role of Sensory
Knowledge in the Age of the Self-Organizing Brain 31
BARBARA MARIA STAFFORD
3 Nineteenth-Century Visual Incapacities 59
JONATHAN CRARY
4 From Visual Literacy to Image Competence 77
JON SIMONS
5 Th e Visual Complex: Mapping Some Interdisciplinary
Dimensions of Visual Literacy 91
PETER DALLOW
6 Visual Literacy in North American Secondary Schools:
Arts-Centered Learning, the Classroom, and Visual Literacy 105
SUSAN SHIFRIN
v
vi • Contents
7 Philosophical Bases for Visual Multiculturalism at the
College Level 129
WILLIAM WASHABAUGH
8 Bridging the Gap between Clinical and
Patient-Provided Images 145
HENRIK ENQUIST
9 Th e Image as Cultural Technology 165
MATTHIAS BRUHN AND VERA DÜNKEL
10 Visual Literacy in Action: “Law in the Age of Images” 179
RICHARD K. SHERWIN
Aft erword 195
CHRISTOPHER CROUCH
Photo Credits 205
Index 209
Preface
A tremendous force of rhetoric has been brought to bear on the notion
that ours is a predominantly visual culture. Th eories concerning the
visual nature of experience have been proposed in art history, cognitive
psychology, psychoanalytic criticism, anthropology, artifi cial intelligence,
women’s studies, neurobiology, neuropsychology, linguistics, and various
branches of philosophy. At the same time, there is little discussion about
how visual practices might inform a university education. First-year classes
in universities throughout the world remain text-based, with images as an
option oft en declined.
Th e central purpose of this book is to ask about the possibility of turning
the tenor of university education, at least in part, from text-based knowl-
edge to visuality. Th e central premise is that theorizing on images, which
currently takes place mainly in graduate studies in the humanities and in
cognitive science, needs to move downward, toward fi rst-year education,
where it can begin to directly intervene in the ordinary education of every
college student.
Th is book began as a conference and exhibition held at University
College Cork in Ireland, in April 2005. Originally this was intended as a
massive volume: it was to include another part of the conference on visual-
ity in diff erent nations, and a text-intensive exhibition of image making in
thirty departments around the university. In the event, those two will be
published separately. Th e material on visuality in Western and non-West-
ern countries will appear as Visual Cultures, and the exhibition of visual
practices outside the arts will be a book called Visual Practices across the
vii
viii • Preface
University.1 Together they comprise a single pedagogic and philosophic
project, to try to get a provisional idea of the sum total of theories, prac-
tices, “competencies,” and literacies of the visual.
I owe a great deal of thanks to the people at University College Cork,
who helped with all aspects of the conference and exhibition, and above
all to Gerard Wrixon and Áine Hyland—then the president and a vice
president of the university—who supported every initiative I thought of,
no matter how ill-formed. And I owe special thanks to the ordinary (non-
plenary) speakers at the conference, each of whom agreed to write multiple
draft s of his or her paper, in advance of the conference, to ensure they
formed a coherent group. (Some speakers revised their papers as many as
fi ve times before the conference; many of them also wrote revisions aft er-
ward.) With a fi eld as dishevelled as visual studies, it is important to search
for moments of coincidence and agreement.
J. E., April 2007
Endnote
1. Th e former is unpublished; the latter will appear as James Elkins, ed., Visual
Practices across the University (Paderhorn, Germany: Wilhelm Fink Verlag,
2007). Th e reasons for publishing with Wilhelm Fink, and for dividing the
project, are explored in that book.
Introduction
The Concept of Visual Literacy, and Its Limitations
JAMES ELKINS
I chose the expression visual literacy, initially in the book Visual Stud-
ies: A Skeptical Introduction, because its two words compress the common
and unavoidable contradiction involved in saying that we “read” images.
Visual literacy does not avoid that contradiction, or try to improve on it,
but starts with the most succinct form of the contradiction itself. Tropes of
reading are unavoidable in talk about images, as W. J. T. Mitchell argues
in this volume, and visual literacy has the virtue of not trying to solve that
structural problem. Th at is the fi rst reason for the title of this book. A sec-
ond reason has to do with pedagogy. A search of newspaper and magazine
databases revealed that visual literacy has been in uncommon but inter-
mittent use for over a hundred and fi ft y years; it has been used to denote
low-level, secondary school appreciation, of the sort that enables a student
to identify Michelangelo’s David. I like that somewhat dusty feel, because
it is a reminder that these issues of visuality impinge on undergraduate
curricula. Visual literacy, or literacies—the plural will be at issue through-
out—are as important for college-level education as (ordinary) literacy,
and far less oft en discussed.
A third and last reason for choosing visual literacy is that it is convenient
in the absence of anything better. It might be possible to speak of visual
competence, or visual competencies, but that sounds awkward, utilitarian,
and prescriptive. Visual practices is common but vague. Visual languages
is so freighted with inappropriate precedents, from Umberto Eco to Nelson
1