Photographic images have the ability to be ‘read’, if you know what to look for and how to look for it. This type of ‘reading’ of images is known as visual literacy. It is a type of communication that involves sending and receiving messages using images. (Bamford, 2003). It involves three levels of awareness and ‘seeing’ by the user.
- Superficial- what is the picture of?
- Concrete- what is is about?
- Abstract- what is the context? what did the creator intend to invoke in the viewer?
“Visual literacy involves developing the set of skills needed to be able to interpret the content of visual images, examine social impact of those images and to discuss purpose, audience and ownership” (Bamford, 2003). Visual literacy is the gaining of knowledge and understanding about the workings of visual media along with a heightened conscious awareness of said workings. Visual literacy can be described as what is “seen with the eye and what is then ‘seen’ with the mind” (Bamford, 2003). People who are visually literate have learned and developed the ability to successfully decode and interpret visual messages and to encode and compose meaningful visual communications. And one of the the beneficial things about using photographs in historical research is that those “images can be ‘read’ and advantageously integrated with other historical ‘traces.’” (Mifflin, 2007).
Visual literacy remains a problematic concept for archival thought, especially for photo-archivists and users of photo-archives. Archivists and historians also are aware of the pitfalls as well as the opportunities that photographs present when mined for historical research purposes. There is not much in archival literature that provides any understanding or direction of visual literacy or an understanding of photography as well as other visual media (Conway and Punzalan, 2011). Archivists (who specialize in photos and other media) and researchers alike can benefit from understanding and utilizing visual literacy to better comprehend the photographs they work with. Visual literacy has been be promoted as a framework to mend an imbalance that favours historical research based on textual analysis (Conway and Punzalan, 2011).
While photographs have most often been used just to illustrate a point in textual resources, it is becoming more and more common to use a photograph to entirely elucidate a point when they are in a collection consisting of photos alone and also integrated in with historical textual collections (Mifflin, 2007). For example in the article “Visual Archives in Perspective: Enlarging on Historical Medical Photographs” the authors write that historical medical photographs “can contribute much to our understanding of people, situations, and relationships not addressed by materials such as letters, diaries, administrative records, journal articles, and other textual sources” (Mifflin, 2007). This thought could easily be applied to other photographic collections held in archives. Photographic collections can be analyzed by looking at their visual, material, and archival properties. The archival field has made it clear from early on that there is a need for increased awareness of visual literacy by those who “those who appraise, arrange, describe, and provide access to visual materials” (Kaplan and Mifflin, 1996).
The meaning of a photograph is something that is constantly being mediated, even after the photo has already entered the archive, and it is the job of the archivist to continue to examine that meaning. Understanding the many levels of meaning that are inherent in a photograph requires a much broader understanding by the archivist of the contextual information of photographs. Jeffrey Mifflin writes that it is important to understand that the archival value in photographs resides in the relationships between photographs and the people who created them and the other structures that give those photographs context (Mifflin, 2007). However much of the visual literacy theory that can be applied to photographic archives may have to be reexamined in relation to the digitization of archival photographic collections. Is it possible for a digitized archival photographs to be examined in the same way as it’s physical counterpart? There could be problems with finding a narrative between discreet, as one would with physical images, when interacting with a digitized collection.
The digitization of photographs, through scanning and post-scanning enhancements, essentially transforms the original visual and material characteristicst of the source image. It becomes a representation of a representation which can be problematic for users as they try to interpret those digitized photographs. According to Conway and Punzalan digital visual literacy is a new part of the visual literacy theory that “is attempting to reconcile new technologies of visual remediation with traditional forms of interpretation conducted with the photographic item in hand” (Conway and Punzalan, 2011). There have been concerns about the user interaction with photographic collections that have been digitized. “Users who work exclusively in the digital environment face a dilemma in attempting to identify visual truth.
If the surrogate has questionable features, such as blemishes or partial blurring, the recourse is sometimes the least-worst option of rejecting the item in favor of one that may have less emotional power but greater visual clarity” (Conway, 2010). When photographic collections are digitized the image and its use is, in many ways, transformed, recontextualized, and remediated. So, the major question is: Do users interact with those images the same way as when they would handle and examine the physical image? Some scholars suggest contextualizing digital images in the same way as one would their material counterpart (Conway, and Punzalan, 2011). And by doing that it eliminates the idea that electronic images are not the same as physical images, that they cannot be handled. If users and photo-archivists alike can treat digitized photographs as actual artifacts instead of surrogates for the physical image, then archivists and users may be able to discover new interpretations of photo collections and develop even further levels of understanding of visual meaning.
Sources:
Conway, Paul and Ricardo Punzalan. “Fields of Vision: Toward a New Theory of Visual Literacy for Digitized Archival Photographs.” Archivaria 71 (Spring 2011): 63-97, accessed April 16, 2014. http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/85226/J19%20Conway%20Punzalan%20Fields%20of%20Vision%202011%20-%20preprint.pdf?sequence=1
Kaplan, Elizabeth and Jeffrey Mifflin, “‘Mind and Sight’: Visual Literacy.” Archival Issues 21, no. 2 (1996): 107-27, accessed April 16, 2014. http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/11299/46590/1/kaplan_mifflin_mind_sight.pdf
Conway, Paul “Modes of Seeing: Digitzed Photographic Archives and the Experienced User.” The American Archivist. Vol 73. (Fall/Winter 2010): 425-462. Accessed April 17, 2014. http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/85224/J17%20Conway%20Modes%20of%20Seeing%202010.pdf?sequence=1
Mifflin, Jeffrey, “Visual Archives in Perspectives: Enlarging on Historical Medical Photographs,” The American Archivist, vol. 70 (Spring/Summer 2007): 32-69. Accessed April 18, 2014. http://archivists.metapress.com/content/y62u7r85381173u1/fulltext.pdf
Bamford, Anne. “The Visual Literacy White Paper,” 2003. Accessed April 18, 2014. https://wwwimages2.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/education/pdfs/visual-literacy-wp.pdf
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