Following earlier work on visual images of literacy, our current study analyses a corpus of newspaper photographs of literacy practices using software packages designed for qualitative data analysis. We aim to explore methodological issues around the analysis of visual data and to examine ways in which literacy practices are portrayed in the media. This project is associated with the activities of a new research group at Lancaster, the Issues in Image-Based Research Group. This group will be organising a Special Interest Group at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference at Lancaster in September 1996.