Kuvanluku

Kuvanluku is a Finnish term that denotes the ability to interpret and understand visual content, and is commonly equated with visual literacy. In educational and scholarly contexts it refers to skills for analyzing images in terms of meaning, message, audience, and social or cultural context.

Practically, kuvanluku involves examining factors such as composition, color, framing, symbolism, and production context to understand how imagery communicates and what it might omit or bias. It also considers how images are used to persuade, establish norms, or reflect power relations, as well as how different viewers might interpret the same image differently.

The concept is applied across many domains, including education, journalism, advertising, art education, museums, and libraries. In a digital landscape with abundant imagery, kuvanluku supports critical viewing and multimodal comprehension, helping people assess credibility, identify manipulation, and translate visual information into textual or alternative formats when needed.

There is variation in how kuvanluku is defined and taught among institutions, and it is closely related to related terms such as visual literacy (visuaalinen lukutaito) and media literacy. It intersects with disciplines like image analysis, semiotics, and digital culture studies, and it often incorporates frameworks from those fields to analyze visual communication in contemporary media.