Response to Barthes' "Rhetoric of the Image"

Barthes talks about the image and how "...the image is felt to be weak in the respect of meaning: there are those who think that the image is an extremely rudimentary system in comparison with language and those who think that signification cannot exhaust the image's ineffable richness."
A photograph should offer us three messages: a linguistic message, a coded iconic message, and a non-coded iconic message. The linguistic message refers to the words in or around an image that help to explain the photograph one is looking at. Barthes says that in today's society, it seems every image is presented with a text to explain a photograph; this could be a title or a caption. I would completely agree with this. I've taken photography classes for the last 3 years and in every critique I've had, the professor has asked me to name a photo or series of photos to describe something about them. I never think to do that as I'm taking the pictures or even how they all fit together until after they are finished in photoshop and in front of me. I feel like things could be interpreted the wrong way without a title or explanation with it, hence artist statements, but at the same time I do think that an image speaks volumes on its own. There shouldn't need to be a caption unless the "artist" wants to convey a specific message. I like the idea of people getting what they want out of a photo and seeing something different than the person who looks at it after them. In news and advertisements, I agree that photos should be presented with text, but not when it comes to art, but that is because you only want to convey one message.
He makes references to the literal image and the symbolic image when it comes to advertising. I would consider the literal image to be that one message you get because of your experiences and the symbolic one to be taken any way, or more than one way, as you look at it. I agree that everything is constructed. You may not think about how it is when you take a picture, but there is meaning behind why you took that picture and why you stood in that spot, at that angle and chose to take it at that moment. Culture is a huge part of what happens when an image is constructed. There are certain things you can do and cannot, even as you try to do something no one has ever done before. You must start with the trend before you move on to something new. Ideas are created by our experiences in culture.