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What Does This Picture Say: reading about the Intertextuality of Visual Images
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Werner, Walter |
| Copyright Year | 2004 |
| Abstract | Our social worlds are visually saturated. A feature of post-modern society is its relentless traffic in images, often borrowed from diverse times and places, and patched together in ever changing ways. This traffic serves commercial purposes, shapes identities, and increasingly stands in for reality itself. As a newspaper columnist noted, “most of us have seen far more images of reality than we have actual landscapes, personalities, or violence. Even an event as unique as September 11 can’t seem to stand on its own. Think of all those who said they felt they were watching a movie.” Teaching students to read this flow of images is a task shared across all school subjects. For social studies educators, though, the visual is significant because it carries and interprets the social. Pictures frame the events, issues, and values of our collective experience. They show us what to believe and do, and who our heroes and friends are supposed to be. They entertain, inform, comfort, disturb, and cajole. So do the images within social studies textbooks, and understanding how this works is part of learning to interpret the broader social world. A helpful tool is the concept of intertextuality as used within the literature of visual culture where authors theorize the production, circulation, uses, and changing meanings of images across time and place. My purpose is to discuss three questions: What is intertextuality? What forms does it take? What are the implications? Such questions are important for social educators because “human experience is now more visual and visualized than ever before. In many ways, people in industrialized and post-industrial societies now live in visual cultures to an extent that seems to divide the present from the past.” Intertextuality is central to this experience. |
| Starting Page | 64 |
| Ending Page | 82 |
| Page Count | 19 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Volume Number | 19 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ718728.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
