This work presents a discriminative model for the retrieval of pictures from text queries. The core idea of this approach is to minimize a loss directly related to the retrieval performance of the model. For that purpose, we rely on a ranking loss which has recently been successfully applied to text retrieval problems. The experiments performed over the Corel dataset show that our approach compares favorably with generative models that constitute the state-of-the-art (e.g. our model reaches 21.6% mean average precision with Blob and SIFT features, compared to 16.7% for PLSA, the best alternative).