Basic Strategies in Reading Photographs

How a photograph is composed? By learning what visual elements the artist uses to communicate with you, you may appreciate better why you like or don't like a particular work of art.

• Develop visual literacy
• Learn the basic vocabulary used in formal analyses in the visual arts
• Combine content information with formal analysis to "read" (analyze) photographs

To enhance your appreciation of photography it is necessary to develop the skills to make careful visual analysis. While everyone can easily discuss the contents of photographs ("what you see"), most need more training to learn about formal analysis used in the visual arts. Formal analysis focuses on an artwork's "formal" qualities, or those visual elements that give it form. These include: shape, size, texture, line, space, etc.
Formal analysis provides a basic common language in the visual arts. However, a description of a photograph based only on formal analysis would be incomplete. Photographers make decisions both about composition (arrangement of visual elements) as well as content (meaning) when taking photographs. Consequently, it is important to consider the artist's intentions for making a photograph of a particular subject. Finally, the historical and social context in which a photograph was made must also be carefully considered.

http://nuovo.com/southern-images/analyses.html#vocabulary