Visual ""literacy"": Image, Mind, And Reality - Tapa dura

People today are constantly bombarded with a wide variety of visual images - from television, advertisements, billboards and the cinema, as well as more conventional forms of visual art. Faced with such a visual overload, how do we interpret these images? What causes us to respond emotionally to these pictures? And how does this response differ for visual devices such as close-ups, camera angles and flashbacks? Providing a foundation for answering these and other questions surrounding the debate over "visual literacy", this book takes readers through the four major conceptual levels of visual understanding: imparting visual literacy as a prerequisite for comprehending visual media; creating awareness of the general cognitive consequences of visual literacy; becoming alert to visual manipulation; and promoting aesthetic appreciation of the images seen.

Paul Messaris is associate professor of communication at The Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He has conducted research on viewers' awareness of visual manipulation in movies and advertising, and on parent-child discussions about television. He has also taught 16mm film production.