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Learning to See: Three Approaches to Journalistic Photography Interpretation
In this paper, I present and discuss three various approaches and tools for the interpretation of journalistic photographs, which can be used as exercises in visual literacy. The first tool, the Press Photograph Story Analysis model, was inspired mainly by Peirce’s Sign Theory. The second one is an intertextual approach to photography interpretation, which concentrates on connotative content analysis with minor attention to photographic context. The third tool is a compilation of elements of visual semiotics, visual rhetoric, Barthes’s concepts of studium and punctum, Barrett’s (2010) principles for interpreting photographs, and compositional interpretation (Rose 2012). The tools are illustrated by extracts from students’ interpretation of journalistic photographs. All presented approaches were designed to facilitate learning and teaching in the higher education context.