Questions for Analyzing Images
-THE IMAGE ITSELF
1) What is your first response?
2) What is the subject or content?
3) What is the primary purpose? Are there additional purposes you need to consider?
4) How is the image arranged in the visual space? Can you diagram its overall composition?
What effect does this arrangement have on the way you read this image?
5) What strikes you as important, interesting, or emotionally moving in this image? Can You
identify elements of the image that could be seen as symbolic?
6) Does this image include words or a caption? How are those words used? Do they simply
identify the image? Are they a part of the image? What do they contribute to the overall
message?
7) What does this image remind you of? Have you seen anything like it somewhere else?
Where? How is this image similar to those others? How does it differ?
8) Is this a serious or comic image? How do you know?
-THE IMAGE’S SOURCE
9) What is the medium and what do you normally expect from images in this medium?
10) What is the genre? Does the image conform to the conventions of that genre or does it
break from the expectations? [We expect something different from a museum painting for
example, than from a cartoon. And we expect cartoons on the comics page to be different from
those on the editorial page.]
11) Can you identify the author? If so, what else has he or she done? Is this image like the
author’s other work or is it different? What accounts for this difference?
12) Where does the image come from? [For example, is it from a magazine? What magazine?
What do you know about the audience for that magazine?]
-THE IMAGE AND SOCIETY
13) How do you think others read this image? [Ask students, friends, relatives, or coworkers for
their responses to the image.]
14) What are the larger historical, political, social, cultural, and economic contexts of the
image?
15) What can you learn about society by examining this image?
16) How does this image affect/reflect the society in which it was produced?