We started with a question.
What does it mean to truly be seen?
Not photographed. Not documented. Not observed. Seen — witnessed with honesty and care, on your own terms, in a way that reflects who you actually are.
That question is the heartbeat of the Minnesota Center for Visual Literacy. And it didn’t come from a textbook.
Where this came from.
In sixth grade, a girl pointed a film camera at her desk lamp — a bent metal thing, hot to the touch — and made a close-up black and white photograph of the light bulb. The way she saw it. Not the way anyone told her to see it. Something shifted. For the first time, she had a tool that told the truth. That girl grew up to spend 25 years behind a camera — as a portrait photographer, a photo researcher and editor, and a photography educator. She earned a BA in Cultural Anthropology and a professional photography certification. She built businesses. She taught hundreds of students. And through all of it, she kept asking the same question: who gets to be seen? Who decides how? And what happens to the people the frame leaves out?
Images are not passive. They shape belief, memory, and perception — whether we're paying attention or not.
What we stand for.
We believe everyone has the right to see clearly — and to be seen clearly.
We believe images carry power. They shape who is remembered and who is forgotten, whose story gets told and whose gets erased. Understanding that power is not optional — it’s essential.
We believe visual literacy belongs in every community, not just in art schools or newsrooms. It belongs in living rooms, community centers, classrooms, and public conversation.
We believe the people most affected by how images work in the world are the ones who most deserve the tools to understand and challenge them.
And we believe in truth — not as an abstraction, but as something that can be seen, preserved, and protected.
The person behind the mission.
Giliane E. Mansfeldt is the founder and executive director of the Minnesota Center for Visual Literacy. She is a portrait photographer, photo researcher, photography educator, and cultural anthropologist with 25 years of experience and a lifelong commitment to the question of what it means to be truly seen.
She holds a BA in Cultural Anthropology and a professional photography certification. She has worked as a photo researcher and editor at Lerner Publishing in Saint Paul for more than 16 years, and runs her own portrait studio, Giliane E. Mansfeldt Photography.
She founded MNVL because she believes that the questions she has spent her life asking — about visibility, representation, truth, and the power of images — are questions every person deserves the tools to ask for themselves.
Five ways we do the work
Our programming is organized around five pillars — five interconnected areas of inquiry that together make up what it means to be visually literate in the world we actually live in.