Systematic looking: analysing the composition, production and audiences of images to explain how they make meaning.
Key thinkers: Gillian Rose, Gunther Kress, Theo van Leeuwen
The longer story
Visual analysis examines images—photographs, artworks, films, advertisements, any visual material. Compositional analysis describes formal elements: line, colour, space, framing. Semiotic analysis decodes visual signs. Discourse analysis situates images in social practices. The challenge is translating visual experience into words without losing what's distinctively visual. What does this image do that words couldn't? How does visual rhetoric work differently from verbal? Looking is already interpretation; visual analysis makes that interpretation accountable.