Social sciences have deliberately neglected visual materials for a considerably long time (Becker 2000, Bartmanski 2012). Sensual experience, accompanying encounters with images as well as other material things that surround us has therefore never been taken into account as a constitutive part of meaning-making processes. While meaning was thought of as emerging in discourse, images were considered to be emotional and enchanting, and thus escaped sociological theory and research. In order to compensate for this long-standing neglect, a new paradigm within the strong programme in cultural sociology (Alexander, Smith 2003) emerged recently. It challenges the old attitude toward the visual, asks new questions and provides new perspectives on the material as well as new research directions (Bartmanski, Alexander 2012). The effort to grasp the sensual and material side of social life materialized in icons has resulted in establishing a notion of iconic power. Why sociology now cares about the material, how does the discipline benefit from the iconic concept, and what possible problems announced iconic turn brings are some of the questions I will deal with in this thesis. The main concern is, however, to provide the reader with a more complex insight into iconicity which eventually shows the concept's significance within cultural sociology.