Posted 2:43 p.m. Friday, Dec. 1, 2023
Critical visual literacy in activism
By Mike Olson
Because information literacy involves not just words and data but images as well, college students need opportunities to develop critical methods of interacting with visual information to become discerning citizens. The protest art of social justice movements provides a rich body of work for exploring critical visual literacy in action.
Critical visual literacy has been defined as the ability to investigate the sociocultural contexts of visuals to illuminate power relations. Power structures use visuals to create and shape cultural values. Power manipulates images as a tool of sociocultural dominance. Artist-activists also use images, but they use them to challenge the values that power is trying to sell. In the hands of artist-activists, critical visual literacy becomes a tool for creating counterimages in the pursuit of social justice.
On October 7, 2023, I presented “Critical Visual Literacy in Activism - Counterimages: Radically Repurposed Visual Culture in Violet Ray's Advertising the Contradictions” at Ways of Seeing, the 55th Annual Conference of the International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA), hosted by the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
The presentation highlights the artist-activist known as Violet Ray’s critical response to visual culture as a potent example of how visual literacies can be activated to interpret, respond to and act upon received cultural imagery. Frustrated by what he saw as the self-defeating visual tactics of the antiwar movement, Ray decided to “speak the language of the supermarket rather than political jargon” to create advertisements against the war in Vietnam. Determined to destabilize power relations, he set about physically deconstructing the colorful contents of LIFE magazine, inserting the magazine’s war photos into its product advertisements.
Reproduced as posters and distributed at antiwar marches, the collages’ stark juxtaposition of such disparate imagery had a powerful effect, forcing American consumers to make complex associations connected directly to their own lifestyles and values. Ray realized that it wasn’t just the war in Vietnam he was protesting but the capitalist consumer culture supported by that conflict. This is critical visual literacy in activism, investigating the sociocultural contexts of images, illuminating power relations by responding with counterimages.
A counterimage, simply defined, is an image that contradicts another. Artist-activists, frequently anonymously, engage complex critical visual literacies to create confrontational counterimages, designed to interrogate dominant power structures, challenging the status quo. Counterimages give voice to other interpretations and other experiences. They visualize dissent from dominant culture. And they play an important role in the ongoing struggle for social justice. Counterimages frequently appropriate existing imagery, hijacking its emotional charge, subverting it to contradict its meaning. Critics of counterimages argue about the ethics of image appropriation. But consider how the ethics of image appropriation might differ for those in power versus the oppressed.
In 2022, heeding the call of information literacy instructors for a shift to critical visual literacy, the Association of College and Research Libraries published The Framework for Visual Literacy in Higher Education. The Framework encourages learners to “explore choices made in the production of visual communications to produce meaning and develop skills to remix visuals to create messages tailored to the needs of a specific audience.” This is just what critical visual literacy in activism does with counterimages, challenging the authority of cultural imagery with contradictory visual responses. Studying activist art lets us examine power relations and helps us develop the critical visual literacy skills necessary for crafting responses in the pursuit of social justice in a participatory democracy.