Ken Wentworth

'It was an attempt to diagnose the 'pictorial turn' in contemporary culture, the widely shared notion that visual images have replaced words as the dominant mode of expression in our time. Picture theory tried to analyse the pictorial, or (as it is sometimes called) the 'iconic' or 'visual' turn, rather than simply accept it on face value. It was designed to resist received ideas about 'images replacing words', and to resist the temptation to put all the eggs in one disciplinary basket, wether art history, literary criticism, media studies, philosophy, or anthropology. Rather than relying on a pre-existing theory, method, or discourse to explain pictures, I wanted to let them speak for themselves. Starting from metapictures, or pictures that reflect on the process of pictorial representation itself, I wanted to study pictures themselves as forms of theorizing. The aim in short, was to picture theory, not to import a theory of pictures from somewhere else.

I don't mean to suggest, of course, that Picture Theory was innocent of any contact with the rich archive of contemporary theory. Semiotics, rhetoric, poetics, aesthetics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, ethical and ideological criticism, and art history were woven (probably too promiscuously) into a discussion of the relations of pictures like description and narration; the function of texts in visual media like painting, sculpture and photography; the peculiar power of images over persons, things, and public spheres.'

Mitchell, W. J.T, What do pictures want? The lives and loves of images (2005, University of Chicago Press).