In this book, the "pictorial turn" is considered from the perspectives across the humanities and social sciences in order to consider what pictures or images are, how they operate on observers and the world, and how their history is to be understood.

1. "As if": Situating the Pictorial Turn Neal Curtis 2. Pictorial versus Iconic Turn: Two Letters Gottfried Boehm and W. J. T. Mitchell 3. Do Pictures Really Want to Live? Jacques Rancière 4. The Future of the Image: Rancière's Road Not Taken W. J. T. Mitchell 5. Obama and the Image Susan Buck-Morss 6. Magical Nominalism: Photography and the Re-enchantment of the World Martin Jay 7. Images, Totems, Types and Memes: Perspectives on an Iconological Mimetics Norman MacLeod 8. The Pictorial Uncanny Lydia H. Liu 9. Looking at Saying in W. J. T. Mitchell Robert Morris 10. Responses to Tom Mitchell's Enquiry into the Life of Images Antony Gormley 11. What Do Drawings Want? Michael Taussig 12. What Does Landscape Want? A Walk in W. J. T. Mitchell's Holy Landscape Larry Abramson 13. The Sea and the Land: Biopower and Visuality from Slavery to Katrina Nicholas Mirzoeff 14. The Trip to Jerusalem Stephen Daniels 15. Politics: An Interview with W. J. T. Mitchell Marquard Smith