The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens

A 2013 argument that the spread of video and screens has outrun our ability to read and make images, and that visual literacy should be taught as writing is.

Apkon compares recent changes in video recording, editing and distribution to the arrival of movable type. He says most people cannot read the grammar of visual communication or the craft of making it. He draws parallels between film grammar and written language and uses examples such as the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates to show how visuals shape perception. Martin Scorsese wrote the foreword. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published it in 2013, with 263 pages and a bibliography.

Apkon is a former Goldman Sachs investment banker with a Harvard MBA. He founded the Jacob Burns Film Center in Westchester, New York, in 2000, with visual literacy education at its center, and led it until 2013. He later directed the documentaries Disturbing the Peace (2016) and There Is Another Way (2025).