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Reading visual images
What does a picture or an image tell you? This free course, Reading visual images, is an introduction to analysing and interpreting photographs as social data. Who controls what the image is saying? You will look at how photographs provide visual evidence and how they can illustrate and support our ideas about society.
Course learning outcomes
After studying this course, you should be able to:
- recognise how images can be analysed and interpreted
- comprehend how images can be used to express uncertainties
- give examples of images that show change and social and cultural diversity.
First Published: 10/08/2012
Updated: 20/06/2018
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I studied this as part of my studies as a photographer to understand something of the way photographs can be interpreted and therefore undertand how to make such images more meaningful.
The interpretation of the pictures in the course was challenging and often I was going off at a tangent compared to the model answers in the course reading. But that was a useful realisation of what I needed to concentrate on in order to take more valid inferences from the photos.
This is not an area of study I have pursued before so it was very useful and opened my mind to a different way of thinking.