Visual Ignorance: Seeing Meaning in a World of Images That Has Left Us Blind (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9791298633117)

We are the most visually saturated society in history, and arguably the least visually literate. Visual Ignorance argues that our capacity for genuine visual understanding (the kind our ancestors brought to a cave wall or a woven pattern) has been steadily hollowed out, even as the sheer volume of images around us has exploded.

The book traces this transition as a historical arc: from prehistoric symbolic marks on stone, weaving and pottery, through the rise of portraiture and photography, into the image-saturated worlds of advertising, consumer culture, and social media. Along the way, it asks a deceptively simple question: what does it actually mean to see something, rather than merely look at it? This book shows how each new image technology has changed the answer, usually at a cost we rarely notice.

Then the book educates the reader on how to use semiotics and iconology in order to understand any image, anywhere.

Written in a companionable, easy to read voice Visual Ignorance is both a diagnosis and a toolkit. Its second half hands readers concrete ways to read the images that surround them: advertisements, family photographs, museum paintings, and the pictures they scroll past a hundred times a day.

Part of the Practical Guides for Decoding Meaning in Daily Life series from Meaning Works. Richly illustrated, full color throughout.