In this companion volume to "Iconology", the author investigates pictures - the concrete, representational objects in which images appear. Focusing on popular and television coverage of the Gulf War, he examines the capacity of visual images to awaken/stifle public debate, emotion and violence.

What precisely, W. J. T. Mitchell asks, are pictures (and theories of pictures) doing now, in the late twentieth century, when the power of the visual is said to be greater than ever before, and the "pictorial turn" supplants the "linguistic turn" in the study of culture? This book by one of America's leading theorists of visual representation offers a rich account of the interplay between the visible and the readable across culture, from literature to visual art to the mass media.