Kress and Van Leeuwen discuss how narrative representations are created, understood, and interacted with through the use of visual literacy. The way we understand narratives in images is not far off to our linguistic understanding of the written language; we utilize some but not all of the same literacy skills when trying to decode narratives of a visual text; i.e a painting, cartoon, film, etc. Depending on the image there are represented participants, the "participants who constitute the subject of the communication...people, places, and things represented," in the image (pg 48). These are featured in the visual as the 'actor' and the 'goal,' which can simply be transformed into our linguistic understanding of 'noun' and 'object.' The noun acts on the object, as the actor acts on the goal. However, It is not always easy to identify the roles of these participants in a visual image. This idea is although, very similar to the way we decode language. For example, we often interpret meaning differently when a noun/subject is removed from a sentence, passive voice can change our understanding of fault and blame (the toy broke), and our placement of objects in a sentence has impact on our feelings towards that object (women are often represented as objects both in images and written word).
This is true in the visual as well, different participants in images represent different roles. Moreover, the fusion or disconnect between these participants can change and create different meaning (pg 53). Kress and Van Leeuwen use our socialized understanding of shapes to address this point. They explain that certain shapes based on western ideals will always represent a certain meaning, circles represent femininity, infinity, nature (pg 54). These can work as either actors or goals depending on the images purpose or meaning; however, the authors make clear that it is our cultural and socialized understanding of these shapes that create that narrative.
This is where the interactive participant, becomes an important role in visual literacy. They use their cultural understanding and obtained knowledge to create meaning of the visual image. The interactive participant is able to identify other participants in the piece like the actor, goal, and reactor. Van Leeuwen and Kress uses an example of an ad for water to support this. Due to our cultural understanding of male and female roles, viewers of this ad are able create narrative through viewing the woman as the reactor, encouraging the male, and the man as the actor, taking on the role of the noun or the doer. The narrative reads for me with a feminist interpretation, man drinks the right type of water and the woman is applauding him on his intelligence. However, other interpretations will/can reach a similar understanding but with a different narrative.
Exploring visual literacy with students, will help them to develop skills to examine the world critically, where they can not only create narrative but deconstruct negative images in the media or advertisements. Visual critical literacy is important in ensuring that students are able to read between the lines of a text (whether written or not) not just grasp the intended narrative of the author/creator.
Kress and van Leeuwen, “Reading Images, The Grammar of Visual Design”, Routledge, New York, NY, 2007
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