Visual Literacy and Egglestone
Door kunstvlo op September 11, 2009 09:39. 20 comments
It is commonplace to state we are living in a visual world. We’re surrounded by images but we should ask ourselves to which degree we really understand them. For seeing them doesn’t mean we are able to read them as well. What’s an image trying to tell us? What’s the (underlying) message? The medium that illustrates this perfectly is photography.
Although we have the illusion that a snapshot helps us to grasp a moment in time, reality most of the time gets completely distorted through the photographer’s lens. Photo-technology really makes fun of us here. What do we see? Pictures full of beautiful colors, touching sceneries and nice people. But why is it often so different in our recollection? Our past in pictures is usually a lot more vived and spectacular than we have experienced it in real life.
A great example in this respect is the work of photographer William Egglestone. Egglestone is known for the photographs he took in the 1960s and 1970s and for his use of bright colours. Consequently, his pictures of American daily life often emanate a kind of nostalgic sweet atmosphere but this is deceiving. When you try to look further his works very quickly lose their idyllic character and feelings of discord and isolation arise instead. The same desolation you can find in paintings of Edward Hopper.
The key concept here is ‘visual literacy’, i.e. the ability to look at images, to analyse, interpret and evalute them critically. In future posts I’ll get back to this and try to explain how you can help your viewers to improve their visual literacy.
For what you see is not always what you get.