“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

“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