Faithful Elephants

Visual Essay on Literacy

This collection of images depicts mediums, other than personal communication, by which information seeps into my life and therefore require literacy to decode and translate into something meaningful. The visual impact that I hope to achieve is a connection to the reader/viewer by virtue of shared experience with these mediums. An attempt at visual coherence is through colors of the images and also vintage of the mediums. I specifically chose older versions (except for the computer because an old computer didn't have internet capabilities) because I wanted to make the point that these mediums have been around for awhile, even if they have not been studied in secondary classrooms focused on literacy before (as Selfe points out). No image has prominence over the others because the messages of the mediums they depict are all influential in my life and I don't know how to rank their importance without untangling that collective knowledge web. The order of images is roughly the order in my life in which the mediums became influential: I learned to read first, then discovered television, music, magazines, radio, and finally the internet. One note/question on citation: Selfe's directions on documenting images was completely new to me, and I've been using images from the internet for awhile without documenting them. Is Selfe's method common practice that should be emphasized and enforced with students? I've avoided the issue in this post by linking each image to the Flickr page where I found it. Is that sufficient?