In an era in which visual culture completely surrounds us, Vogue Italia wants to give its readers the opportunity to look at photography in a critical and conscious way. Once a month we will host on Vogue.it and our Instagram, Reading the Pictures, a web-based, non-profit educational and publishing organization dedicated to visual culture, visual literacy and media literacy through the analysis of news, documentary and social media images.
Through their Chatting the Pictures video format, Michael Shaw, publisher of Reading the Pictures, and Cara Finnegan, writer, professor and historian, will examine news and media images for meaning, trends, context and fairness, helping us to read images, to understand how they work and how they affect us.
You can follow Reading the Pictures on Twitter, Instagram and on the Web.
Climate Crisis Photo Delivers More Than an Instagram Moment
This photo was taken by Justin Sullivan for Getty Images at Horseshoe Bend in Arizona. Behind the young visitor with the selfie stick, we can see the Colorado River which supplies water to 40 million people in seven western states. The river feeds two major reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Lake Powell is at a historic low having dropped 44 feet in the past year.
In the video, Reading the Pictures discusses the surprising complexity of the image. Beyond the Instagram moment and the obvious markers of the climate crisis, it has a lot to say about how we value the environment and how we’ve manipulated it.
CTP is produced by @lilimichelena.
Photo: @sullyfoto for @gettyimages
