Across many disciplines in the arts and in fields such as geography, where visual phenomena are a taken-for-granted way of knowing the world (Nairn, 2005; Rose, 1996; Scott, 1992), the visual is privileged. By contrast, in the field of literacy education, language is privileged, and it is assumed that whatever can be thought or felt can best be expressed through language. In this article, the authors consider three telling examples of boys' hidden talents and conceptual understandings of the visual to elicit how visual methodologies can be used in the literacy classroom. What is new about such an analysis is not so much the focus on gender or on multimodality, but rather the focus on tangible ways of framing visuals to foster and critically frame literacy work. (Contains 4 figures and 1 table.)