Sierra Savage 1

Unit Paper Two: Power & Visual Culture

Power and visual culture very much go hand in hand. Power could refer to anything from

socioeconomic power to literal strength and many things in between. We see power displayed in

visual culture everywhere (i.e. advertising companies selectively choosing images to market a

product to a specific subgroup). According to Hurwitz and Day (2007), visual culture is a very

broad concept that has resisted definition (p. 73). This means that we dont really have a solid

definition but there is a lot of content to be explored within this realm of visual culture. To be

more specific, visual culture can be broken down into connotations and denotations. These are

described by Barrett (2003) as things that are at play in all visual and verbal communication.

More specifically, denotations are exactly what is happening in the image and connotations are

the implications of those denotations.

Power and visual culture are both things that I would explore with my future population

of high school seniors in an English class setting. Foe example, we could discuss power when

reading a novel (i.e. the power dynamics between the different generations of women in Joy

Luck Club). Visual culture is more difficult to tackle but equally if not more important. We could

discuss advertisements and write explanations of different marketing techniques. I could also

assign a role-playing paper at the end of the unit that has students pretending to be a lower level

ad agent who is trying to land a pitch. They would be forced to think about how ads are created

and how to market an item for a specific audience. They would then be exploring the power

dynamics between a boss and worker and also exploring how media knowingly holds power over

the people they are advertising too. Alternatively, we could do something simpler and make this

a conversation about motifs and themes.

 Sierra Savage 2

References

Barrett, T. (2003). Interpreting visual culture. Art Education, 56(2), 6-12.

Hurwitz, A., & Day, M. (2007). Children and their art: Methods for the elementary school, (8 th

ed.). Thompson Wadsworth.