Watch the new season of Amazon Original series Reacher now on Prime Video. Yours with Prime.
Buy new:
-29% $22.87
FREE delivery Wednesday, March 5
Ships from: Rockwood_Books
Sold by: Rockwood_Books
$22.87 with 29 percent savings
List Price: $32.00
FREE delivery Wednesday, March 5. Details
Or fastest delivery February 27 - March 3. Details
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
$$22.87 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details
Price
Subtotal
$$22.87
Subtotal
Initial payment breakdown
Shipping cost, delivery date, and order total (including tax) shown at checkout.
Ships from
Rockwood_Books
Rockwood_Books
Ships from
Rockwood_Books
Returns
30-day refund/replacement
30-day refund/replacement
This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt. You may receive a partial or no refund on used, damaged or materially different returns.
Payment
Secure transaction
Your transaction is secure
We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more
$19.60
Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns
100% satisfaction guaranteed 100% satisfaction guaranteed See less
FREE delivery Wednesday, February 26 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35
Or Prime members get FREE delivery Sunday, February 23. Order within 6 hrs 46 mins.
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
$$22.87 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details
Price
Subtotal
$$22.87
Subtotal
Initial payment breakdown
Shipping cost, delivery date, and order total (including tax) shown at checkout.
Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Follow the author

Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images Paperback – Illustrated, November 15, 2006

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 44 ratings

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$22.87","priceAmount":22.87,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"22","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"87","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"E2o4hgPKuxydzRcDNpbHS3TooqvhaHL6N6QIscnixke3Tfn8TgoGHdyYLX%2BPMQ5yK04sJUntXx17mVsOmKH32eGN175W0WTsRCiXdatJ5Dcn7WK8hTe6O3BDsmCkDvPKejwTe7gVsWPEtAiGwKcUOPBcd8jNShq8qD7hsoeJZ%2BFhbak0Bg7RAgigheHFbyMc","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$19.60","priceAmount":19.60,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"19","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"60","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"E2o4hgPKuxydzRcDNpbHS3TooqvhaHL6XdDsLXfKmrE234mer9R36s0qXuW2IysBx5Xc9c%2BzfqR6cCTze%2FGMp6eu7QsHh1JKNUakmxL%2BchV%2F6lk0yvNxiKOAZI9uwvxdBskn%2BYfyyJnnUSOy%2B2W8mFJTlfNqb%2BZjwYLWPIATvQdphBfgX0XRSA%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

Why do we have such extraordinarily powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even lead us astray?

According to W. J. T. Mitchell, we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects that convey meaning but as animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own.
What Do Pictures Want? explores this idea and highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting. Opening new vistas in iconology and the emergent field of visual culture, he also considers the importance of Dolly the Sheep—who, as a clone, fulfills the ancient dream of creating a living image—and the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, which, among other things, signifies a new and virulent form of iconoclasm.

What Do Pictures Want? offers an immensely rich and suggestive account of the interplay between the visible and the readable. A work by one of our leading theorists of visual representation, it will be a touchstone for art historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and philosophers alike.

“A treasury of episodes—generally overlooked by art history and visual studies—that turn on images that ‘walk by themselves’ and exert their own power over the living.”—Norman Bryson, Artforum

The%20Amazon%20Book%20Review
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now

Frequently bought together

This item: What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images
$22.87
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Ships from and sold by Rockwood_Books.
+
$26.59
Get it as soon as Wednesday, Feb 26
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Sold by ZLIGHT LLC and ships from Amazon Fulfillment.
+
$29.17
Get it as soon as Wednesday, Feb 26
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Sold by YnsSeller and ships from Amazon Fulfillment.
Total price: $00
To see our price, add these items to your cart.
Details
Added to Cart
spCSRF_Treatment
These items are shipped from and sold by different sellers.
Choose items to buy together.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"As the history of art history reveals, to reveal is to also conceal. So what happens when, over many years of studying pictures, you ask them what they want? You find that pictures have a whole lot to say, although interviewing them is not for the uninitiated or fainthearted because ultimately it means interviewing us and our time-honored procedures too. What fun, therefore, to have Tom Mitchell take us on this rollercoaster ride into the image itself, no longer only visual but a full-bodied intellectual experience, forthright and dazzling." -- Michael Taussig

"This lively collection of essays is something more than a critical tour of the problematics of contemporary art theory; it is more than a set of pertinent (or impertinent) interventions on a series of current exhibits, films, and images of all kinds; more even than a tireless and insistent reproblematization of everybody's work on pictures, images, and image society, turning all the new ideas back into questions and more questions. It is also the elaboration of what is surely destined to become an influential new tripartite concept of the object, namely as idol, fetish, and totem." -- Fredric Jameson

“Mitchell’s book is a treasury of episodes—generally overlooked by art history and visual studies—that turn on images that ‘walk by themselves’ and exert their own power over the living, from the resurrection of the dinosaur in the Victorian  natural-history museum, to the quasi-animated statues of Antony Gormley, to the continuing vitality of the visual stereotype of racism. His account offers the most serious challenge in many years to the view that images are merely ‘signs,’ asking only for interpretation or analysis or commentary. What images want from us is much more than that.” -- Norman Bryson ―
Artforum

“Mitchell’s book is a treasury of episodes—generally overlooked by art history and visual studies—that turn on images that ‘walk by themselves’ and exert their own power over the living, from the resurrection of the dinosaur in the Victorian natural-history museum, to the quasi-animated statues of Antony Gormley, to the continuing vitality of the visual stereotype of racism. His account offers the most serious challenge in many years to the view that images are merely ‘signs,’ asking only for interpretation or analysis or commentary. What images want from us is much more than that.” -- Norman Bryson ―
Artforum

"The book displays great analytical energy, playfulness, and insight into the many varied answers that [Mitchell] offers to his own central question: images want to be kissed and touched and heard; they want to trade places with the beholder; they want everything and nothing.  When Mitchell argues that critics should put the image first, he is attempting to open up the field of visual inquiry and avoid any orthodoxy of method, whether psychoanalytic or materialist, that would consider the image as mere symptom or ideological manifestation, an object of iconoclastic destruction of idolatrous esteem.  The strength of
What Do Pictures Want? is that it is less a manifesto on the rules and systems of analysis than a call to expand the field with 'new questions of process, affect, and the spectator position,' a thought experiment on the vitality of images and their ability to create in the present new forms and representations of the deep past and near future, from digitized dinosaurs to cloned sheep." -- Anna Siomopoulos ― Afterimage Published On: 2006-03-01

“This rich volume is of an ‘intimate immensity’. . . sufficient to engage anyone—that is, everyone—interested in visuality under any guise at all. . . . Mitchell has a rare quality of generosity. . . . He is frequently witty, never boring, and always able to move rapidly from one sense to another (in all senses) without any self-conscious delight. This is serious stuff, regardless of its humor. . . . Among his other influential works, this one will hold a particular place, for its wide-ranging and exemplary clarity in a field often troubled by the criticisms of those who doubt the efficacy of such boundary-hopping experiments.” -- Modernism/Modernity ―
Mary Ann Caws Published On: 2006-04-01

co-winner of the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize ―
Modern Language Association Published On: 2006-11-01

"W.J.T. Mitchell is an important theorist, and this book is a valuable addition to the literature of iconology and visual culture." -- Paula Wolfe ―
Art Documentation

"The reader gets an invigorating glimpse of a brilliant mind at work, insatiably asking questions." ―
Choice

"Mitchell combines a dazzling array of theoretical discourses to develop analyses, interpretations and provocations that enable us to better understand the modalities and power of visual culture." -- Hather Collette-VanDeraa and Douglas Kellner ―
International Journal of Communication

From the Inside Flap

Why do we have such powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even lead us astray?
According to W. J. T. Mitchell, we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects that convey meaning but as animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own.
What Do Pictures Want? explores this idea and highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting. Opening new vistas in iconology and the emergent field of visual culture, he also considers the importance of Dolly the Sheep—who, as a clone, fulfills the ancient dream of creating a living image—and the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, which, among other things, signifies a new and virulent form of iconoclasm.
What Do Pictures Want? offers an immensely rich and suggestive account of the interplay between the visible and the readable. A work by one of our leading theorists of visual representation, it will be a touchstone for art historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and philosophers alike.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Chicago Press; New edition (November 15, 2006)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 408 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0226532488
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0226532486
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.3 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.02 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 44 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
W. J. Thomas Mitchell
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
44 global ratings

Review this product

Share your thoughts with other customers

Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2005
    Professor Mitchell has put together an intriguing collection of essays that are distinctly devoid of the presumptuous art talk so often seen in the top periodicals and art blogs of our time - thank you sir! Since these essays are the work of an exceptional scholar, some of us mere mortals may have difficulty in following the abstract constructs and thoroughly academic ponderings. That said, I believe Professor Mitchell poses an interesting fundamental question as to whether the experience of viewing images has evolved within our minds to the point where we actually wonder if they have a life or consciousness of their own. If this is the case, the next question one may ponder is, what do they want? Professor Mitchell is quick to point out that in taking on the exercise of this thought experiment, we are not to proceed as though we are engaged in finding a cure for cancer here - my words, not his - but to proceed on a path of open-ended exploration. In attempting to answer this question, the author guides us along an extensive path that deals with numerous invocations, comparisons, analogies, postulates, arguments and other worldly considerations. Not only are the considerations of the world, but they contain a sampling of nearly everything in the world as well, from biblical chapter and verse to Marx, Blake, Nietzsche, Chaucer, Freud, Dante, et al. In the first half of this book, Professor Mitchell has indeed composed a concerto of tribute to much of Western Civilization. There are worse things one could do. That said, I would encourage the good Professor, in his ninth book (this is his eighth) to forsake his colleagues in academe just enough (heaven forbid!) to leave the huddled masses with fewer more distinct concepts and a more consistent theme. A reduction in the scope of considerations may help the reader to come away with a perception that there is a more differentiated hierarchy of importance amongst the contents of the book. In all fairness, each chapter of this very worthwhile book deserves its own review. I would also submit that the educational potential of this subject matter would not suffer in the least if the Professor were to delete his political inclinations, which, as interesting as they may be, do not enhance the subject matter of this book in any way. Anyone who wants to understand how we really relate to images should read this comprehensive book.
    39 people found this helpful
    Report
  • Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2016
    Essential for visual rhetoricians! Great writer, too.
  • Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2016
    Good!
  • Reviewed in the United States on September 10, 2007
    In the chapter titled the same as the book title, in laying out the grounds for his innovative exposition on images and culture, Mitchell explains, "[Images] present not just a surface but a face [italicized] that faces the beholder." Elsewhere in this chapter, he remarks that images may not have the power attributed to them; which supposed power is seen as absolute and all-encompassing in postmodern culture. Not suggesting that images ave no power, Mitchell takes the position that "the problem is to refine and complicate and refine our estimate of their power and the way it works." The author allows that his perspective based on what pictures "want" rather than what they "do" can at first blush seem to anthropomorphize pictures or give them an aboriginal animistic nature. But Mitchell explains that he means this as metaphorical, conceptual, and theoretical; not literal as in animism or even symbolic as with icons. Mitchell's provisional approach thus corresponds to the provisional quality of postmodern culture to bring extraordinary illumination to this contemporary culture.

    Fantasy, multiple selves, and virtual reality are other terms used to express this provisional quality of postmodernism. Playfulness is another--and Mitchell's book, while sound literarily and with extensive learning and cogent though, exercises the principle that playfulness can take one farther in some cases. Whereas in postmodernism, play with its provisional, usually somewhat artificial attributes is a manner of avoiding commitment and engagement with fundamentals, with Mitchell it is a technique for coming to grips as much as possible with the elusive, ethereal nature of postmodernism. It is impossible to encompass or define postmodernism; whose primary attributes are contingency, continually changing imagery, and pseudo-events and provisional personas to play to the media. But Mitchell has managed to relate postmodernism's sprawling nature and what accounts for this.
    13 people found this helpful
    Report

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English
  • Christopher Allworth
    5.0 out of 5 stars highly recommended
    Reviewed in Canada on August 29, 2023
    An exquisite and extraordinary book. Very worthwhile working through the dense and exciting notions that
    are taking me to a new understanding of picture.
  • renata benia
    5.0 out of 5 stars Livro maravilhoso!
    Reviewed in Brazil on February 8, 2017
    Uma das melhores obras do visual studies. É uma leitura valioso que abre espaço para reflexões importantes sobre a imagem enquanto um organismo provavelmente dotado de vida... Vale muito à leitura!
  • m.cristina
    5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 5, 2016
    Wonderful service...and book!
  • pierre Levens
    5.0 out of 5 stars Pierre Levens
    Reviewed in Germany on September 19, 2013
    What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images; W J T Mitchell
    In the last of his trilogy on art interpretation Mitchell puts the viewer on the pictures side and reviews the way how people are looking at artwork