Pictures, People and Power: People-centred visual aids for development

This title is designed for people who want to make and use pictures for development. It provides guidelines to enable non-artists to make their own visual aids such as discussion starters, picture cards, flannel boards and community maps. It includes sections on: common pictorial conventions; how to draw and use colour; how to copy and adapt pictures; how to make and use a range of people-centred visual aids; and how to plan and conduct workshops on visual communication. The book looks at ways in which visual aids have been designed and used in the past, and shows how the authoritarian approach to communication has failed to promote a more equal distribution of power among people. The author proposes a different approach to work with educational visual aids - a "people-centred" approach - which goes beyond mere participation towards fuller involvement of local people in their own development. The traditional perspective of research studies of visual literacy among non-literate people is shown to be essentially neo-colonial. In this text, by contrast, visual literacy is viewed as a skill that is easy to acquire, rather than as a handicap to overcome by outsider professionals trying to develop a top-down "pictorial language".