VISUAL LITERACY ACTIVITY
DESCRIBE AND DRAW
Drawings produced in response to Mitch Epstein’s photograph Lichtenberg, Berlin (2008) as
part of our Touchstone programme.
This activity is designed to develop pupils’ visual literacy skills by asking them to
describe and draw the subject and compositional elements of photographs.
Step 1. Break your group into pairs. In each pair give one person some paper and a pencil;
give the other a photograph which they must keep hidden so that only they can see it.
Step 2. Ask pupils to describe the photograph to their partner without showing the
photograph; their partner must then try to draw the image based on the description. The pair
can ask questions of each other, act out poses and look at the drawing together as long as the
photograph is kept hidden.
Step 3. When everyone has finished drawing, lay out all of the drawings and compare them.
Then reveal the photograph to the pupils who have been drawing the image.
Feedback: Who found the activity easy and who found it difficult? What are the similarities
and differences between the drawings? How do they compare with the original photograph?
Did the people describing the photograph find any details in the photograph that they
wouldn’t otherwise have noticed? What descriptive words did the people listening find most
useful?
Step 4. You can go on to analyse the photograph further with the group: Where do they think
this photograph is taken? What clues can they find that tells them this? Why do they think the
photographer took this image? What viewpoint was it taken from?