Educating the eye? Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (1996)

This review article of Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (KvL) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (1996) begins by giving a summary of its main issues, and highlights its innovative and bold proposals. In the following sections, some weaknesses and controversial aspects of the book are discussed. Both are seen as following from the semiotic and ideological approach adopted by the authors. Specifically, these affect the proposals for the classification and interpretation of images, and the degree to which the concepts delineated are generalizable. In the later sections, tentative suggestions are made as to how KvL’s approach is relevant to the currently emerging ‘cognitivist’ paradigm.