NYT New Visual Literacy/Photojournalism Feature

[Frank W. Baker]

How do you make sense of what you see when you look at an image, especially if that image comes with no caption, headline, links or other clues about its origins? What can constructing meaning from an image teach you?

That’s what we hope students will figure out together through our new weekly feature, one that focuses on Times photojournalism, visual literacy and critical thinking by asking viewers to think about one interesting photograph a week.

We’ll be working with a program used in schools across the country called Visual Thinking Strategies, choosing the images and experimenting with running a virtual discussion about them on the blog together. Typically, V.T.S. centers on live classroom discussion of works of visual art, so attempting to do something similar online, and with photojournalism instead, will be an experiment for us both. Details here.