Sandin reconstructs Sonesson’s pictorial semiotics as a theory in which images are neither transparent windows nor arbitrary cultural codes, but structured perceptual events whose meaning depends on motivated relations between sign, object and embodied apprehension. Concepts such as secondary iconicity, picture object, picture subject and the sedimentation of impressions give the image an internal architecture: what is seen, what is represented and what is culturally recognised remain analytically distinct. The methodological contribution is especially strong because semiotics is returned to a lifeworld basis rather than reduced to taxonomic sign classification. Photography, film, fine art and architecture can therefore be compared without collapsing their differences. The wider intellectual bridge lies between phenomenology, cognitive semiotics and media theory: representation is understood as a perceptual relation that is materially and culturally organised. For architectural theory, this permits a precise account of why two media may depict the same building while producing different forms of attention, memory and recognition.