Photoshop = AWESOME! I've been poking around at it since our demo, and I am amazed at what it can do! I've never seen any real reason to use it...until Thursday. I think there's something to be said for the element of "play" it invites.

Related to photographs, I'm somewhat disturbed by Gillian Rose's watered-down analyses of visual methods and visual culture. Her definition of ideology is utterly atrocious. In spite of my disgruntlement, however, I do like what she does in the first chapter, where she argues for "critical visual methodology" -- a method for interpreting images and visual artifacts that takes into account the practices involved. I like this because I'm a visual studies/visual culture geek, and thus I am interested in the debates that happen within the field. She's right about the arguments that go on; like Rhetoric and Composition, for example, Visual Studies (as a discipline) often has to fight for, or defend, its legitimacy. Thus, debates about what it does and why abound.

For me, the interest in a critical visual methodology lies in its potential for teaching composition/writing. Not only might we teach students to develop their own "critical visual methodology" for interpreting and analyzing images, but they might apply this to their writing. That is, it seems like the bulleted list of behaviors that Rose claims constitute a "critical visual methodology" are strikingly similar to those we'd want our students to do when they interpret a text. Of course, I'm deliberately dichotomizing "image" and "text" -- in my world, and often in the world of the classes I teach, "text" = "image." (That is, an image is also a text, which I know assumes a lot of things about images, etc, but I think we need, at least for the sake of teaching composition, to join these terms).

I'm not sure what to do with this insight here; I just thought it would be interesting to post and see what you guys all thought. Or, most likely, post anyway! :)