[Reading-hall-of-fame] Ansel Adams and Visualization in Art and Literacy

[tsticht at znet.com]

4/10/2014

Ansel Adams and Visualization in Art and Literacy

Tom Sticht, International Consultant in Adult Education

April 22nd of 2014 marks 30 years since Ansel Adams, the world famous
photographer, died in Monterey, California. My contacts with Adams took
place on different occasions during 1967 to 1976 when I lived in Monterey
and conducted research on literacy for the Human Resources Research Office
(HumRRO) of the George Washington University. I met Adams as a result of my
teaching evening classes on educational research at the Monterey Institute
for Foreign Studies (MIFS) for several years. Adams was an advisor to the
MIFS and each year he invited faculty and staff to attend a party at his
home in Carmel Highlands.

At his home, Adams had a long, large dining room with skylights in the
ceiling which also served as a gallery where he hung some of his
photographs. In discussing photography he talked about a 
cognitive/perceptual process which he called “visualization” in his
photographic work. He talked about the importance of pre-visualizing in his
“mind’s eye” what he was going to photograph. He also discussed the act of
looking, and why many people just look AT a photograph and do not look INTO
the photograph to understand the conceptualization being represented in the
work.

As a part of my research, colleagues and I wrote a 1974 book entitled Auding
and Reading: A Developmental Model. In it we noted that both listening and
looking are information-processing activities that involve an active,
intentional selection, manipulation, and utilization of information. In the
case of looking, this would include the act of looking at pictures or
scenery and constructing images in what Adams called the “mind’s eye.” We
emphasized how the written language skill of looking at and reading printed
symbols built upon the earlier developed spoken language skills of listening
and auding (i.e., the process of listening to speech for comprehension).  We
noted that all reading involves looking processes, though not all looking
processes, such as looking at photographs, involved reading. Adam’s ideas
of visualization fit with the process of forming visualizations of what one
is reading about as a part of the process of comprehending what is read.

Interestingly,  I recently became aware of a new juxtaposition of Ansel
Adam’s work in the visual arts and the work by colleagues and myself on
listening and reading, this time in the Core Knowledge Curriculum developed
by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. and colleagues. In a 2010 book entitled Core Knowledge
Sequence there is a discussion of the relationships of oral language skills
to reading development which draws upon the research colleagues and I did.

The 2010 Core Knowledge Sequence also includes the importance of the study
of the Visual Arts and in discussing the 8th grade sequence of core
knowledge Ansel Adams is recommended as a visual artist whose work ranks
him as one of the great photographic artists of the 20th century. Adam’s
photograph recommended for study is Moonlight, Hernandez, New Mexico, which
has always been one of my favorites and, incidentally, a print of which sold
in 2006 for over $600,000!


On June 20, 2012, I presented a workshop on Listening & Reading Processes of
Adults in Albuquerque, NM in which I discussed the developmental model of
literacy with its relationships among listening, looking, and reading. I
also summarized three decades of R & D on adults' listening and reading
skills and illustrated techniques for training listening skills for
learning by listening and to improve reading fluency and comprehension.


Following the workshop for the New Mexico Coalition for Literacy,  I
traveled from Albuquerque to Santa Fe and on to Taos looking at paintings
by local artists. The small town of Hernandez is along this route and one
can enjoy the great scenery that Adams visualized as photographs in the
1940s. I have come across reports that claimed Ansel Adams was dyslexic. I
don’t have certain knowledge of this, but it is clear that he was not
lacking in visual literacy. There is photographic evidence of this!


tsticht at aznet.net