Visual Literacy or Literary Visualcy

Abstract

Visual literacy has been around for some time as a fundamental notion in the study of art history, iconology, and visual culture. It is a strong and seemingly unavoidable metaphor, one that compares the acquisition of skills, competence, and expertise (quite distinct levels of mastery) to the mastery of language and literature. Seeing, it suggests, is something like reading. But how exactly? And how is seeing diff erent from reading? What are the limits of this metaphor? Even more interesting, what would happen if we reversed the positions of tenor and vehicle in the metaphor, and treated reading as the “tenor”—the thing to be explained-and vision as the vehicle that might help explain it? What would happen, in other words, if we thought of our task as one of research and teaching in reading, based in models drawn from seeing and the visual system?

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