The pictorial turn is a shift from word to images and represents the way that there is an engagement with the visual in politics and mass culture and the visual media. We are not dealing with just pictures in this turn.

The picture is the material object--what we hang on a wall, whilst the image is what appears in the picture and what survives its destruction. Thus there are many pictures of Winston Churchill that contain Churchill image of the political hero or bulldog who saved England in WW2.

Images are not natural---in the sense of being a mirror or an unmediated copy of what they represent. Though there is indeed a likeness, images are conventional---just like the meaning of words---and we have to learn to read them. Since there is no intrinsic relation between the sign and its meaning, so there has to be a convention determining what the meaning of the sign is apart from its likeness.