Visual Content Analysis

Visual Content Analysis is a systematic qualitative method for interpreting images, photographs, films, and other visual media to understand their meanings, social contexts, and cultural significance. Developed from art history, semiotics, and cultural studies—particularly Erwin Panofsky's iconographic method and contemporary approaches by Gillian Rose and Kress and Van Leeuwen—it decodes how images communicate through composition, color, symbol, and cultural convention. The method recognizes that images are not transparent representations but complex texts that require careful interpretive work to reveal embedded meanings and ideological assumptions.