Photographic Literacy

Learn how to teach visual literacy through photography—an easy way for you to combine student interest with resources at hand to enhance a key learning skill. Research indicates that 75 to 90 percent of classroom learning occurs through the visual system, making visual literacy a key component of information literacy and of critical thinking—a requirement throughout the Common Core standards. It's no surprise then that visual literacy is increasingly recognized as a competency that should be part of every student's skill set. Fortunately, this critical skill can be incorporated into existing curriculum, and this book shows you how to do just that. Written for K–12 classroom teachers and librarians, this all-you-need-to-know volume discusses the importance of visual literacy in education and examines how it helps address current learning standards. The book shows you how to use photography and digital images to cultivate critical thinking, inquiry, and information literacy; provides examples of the use of photographic images in the classroom and in "real life"; and addresses how students can be ethical practitioners in a digital world. In addition, the book includes sample lessons you can easily implement, regardless of your level of technical and photographic expertise. A resource list of photo editing, curation, and museum sites is included.

With newly commissioned essays by some of the leading writers on photography today, this companion tackles some of the most pressing questions about photography theory’s direction, relevance, and purpose. This book shows how digital technologies and global dissemination have radically advanced the pluralism of photographic meaning and fundamentally transformed photography theory. Having assimilated the histories of semiotic analysis and post-structural theory, critiques of representation continue to move away from the notion of original and copy and towards materiality, process, and the interdisciplinary. The implications of what it means to ‘see’ an image is now understood to encompass, not only the optical, but the conceptual, ethical, and haptic experience of encountering an image. The 'fractal' is now used to theorize the new condition of photography as an algorithmic medium and leads us to reposition our relationship to photographs and lend nuances to what essentially underlies any photography theory — that is, the relationship of the image to the real world and how we conceive what that means. Diverse in its scope and themes, The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory is an indispensable collection of essays and interviews for students, researchers, and teachers. The volume also features extensive images, including beautiful colour plates of key photographs.

This beautifully illustrated study recaptures the rich history of women photographers and image collectors in nineteenth-century England. Situating the practice of collecting, exchanging and displaying photographs and other images in the context of feminine sociability, Patrizia Di Bello shows that albums express Victorian women's experience of modernity. The albums of individual women, and the broader feminine culture of collecting and displaying imagesare examined, uncovering the cross-references and fertilizations between women's albums and illustrated periodicals, and demonstrating the way albums and photography, itself, were represented in women's magazines, fashion plates, and popular novels. Bringing a sophisticated eye to overlooked images such as the family photograph, Di Bello not only illustrates their significance as historical documents but elucidates the visual rhetorics at play. In doing so, she identifies the connections between Victorian album-making and the work of modern-day amateurs and artists who use digital techniques to compile and decorate albums with Victorian-style borders and patterns. At a time when photographic album-making is being re-vitalised by digital technologies, this book rewrites the history of photographic albums, placing the female collector at its centre and offering an alternative history of photography focused on its uses rather than on its aesthetic or artistic considerations. It is remarkable in elegantly connecting the history of photography with the fields of material culture and women's studies.

This lucid and comprehensive collection of essays by an international group of scholars constitutes a photo-historical survey of select photographers who embraced National Socialism during the Third Reich. These photographers developed and implemented physiognomic and ethnographic photography, and, through a Selbstgleichschaltung (a self-co-ordination with the regime), continued to practice as photographers throughout the twelve years of the Third Reich. The volume explores, through photographic reproductions and accompanying analysis, diverse aspects of photography during the Third Reich, ranging from the influence of Modernism, the qualitative effect of propaganda photography, and the utilisation of technology such as colour film, to the photograph as ideological metaphor. With an emphasis on the idealised representation of the German body and the role of physiognomy within this representation, the book examines how select photographers created and developed a visual myth of the ‘master race’ and its antitheses under the auspices of the Nationalist Socialist state. Photography in the Third Reich approaches its historical source photographs as material culture, examining their production, construction and proliferation. This detailed and informative text will be a valuable resource not only to historians studying the Third Reich, but to scholars and students of film, history of art, politics, media studies, cultural studies and holocaust studies.

This practical guide will help teachers to use the acclaimed "Literacy Through Photography" method developed by Wendy Ewald to promote critical thinking, self-expression, and respect in the classroom. The authors share their perspectives as an artist, a sociologist, and a teacher to show educators how to integrate four new “Literacy Through Photography” projects into the curriculum—The Best Part of Me, Black Self/White Self, American Alphabets, and Memories from Past Centuries. These field-tested projects invite students to create images representing their understanding of themselves and the world around them. The text includes classroom vignettes, project descriptions and lesson plans, and reflections and resources to help teachers explore important social and political topics with their students while also addressing standards across various disciplines and grade levels. Book features: Photography projects related to race, language, history, and body image. A framework for engaging students in essential social justice issues. A versatile model of arts integration in the social studies and literacy curriculum. Many examples of students’ writings, photographs, and drawings. Step-by-step instructions to help teachers implement the projects.

"This anthology investigates books that juxtapose photographs and written language (photo-texts), considering a variety of examples from America, Britain, Canada, and France. Ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun to Michael Ondaatje's postmodern novel Coming Through Slaughter and Edward Said's postdocumentary After the Last Sky, the contributors' analyses address photo-textuality's implications for representation and its cultural contexts. A truly interdisciplinary collection, Photo-Textualities features contributors who work in literary studies (English, romance languages), as well as contributors who work in media studies (film, graphic arts)." "Photo-Textualities invigorates critical inquiry with its range of literary and photographic genres, including photo-texts that elude genre classification. Besides documentary and biography, nonfiction literary genres include autobiography and travelogue. The range of photographic genres extends to landscapes, portraiture, documentary, tourist snapshots, and media images, as well as to the standard photo-textual forms of published album and photo-essay."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This open access book discusses the functionality of the use of the language of photography in teachers' initial and ongoing training. It analyzes the nature of photography as a representation system, facilitating inquiry and reflection on its practice for teachers and evocating on theories and beliefs that may guide their work in classrooms. Photography is used to represent symbolically and affectively possible contradictions in teaching activities or the inconsistencies between planned teaching tasks and the educational purposes pursued. Resolving these conflicts is one of the ways to promote professional development. This book also describes photo-elicitation and photographic storytelling as work procedures. By analyzing the contributions of these techniques, the development of teachers is improved.