Rhetoric of the Image

In this reading, Barthes is analyzing an image, pulling out every meaning it could possibly have. He uses an advertisement upon which to discuss that contains a mesh bag full of red, green, and yellow peppers along side a box of spaghetti that reads 'Panzani. I think he chose this image because advertisements have a certain message in mind, something that they are definitely trying to get across to the reader. He first introduces the "three messages," the linguistic, coded, and non-coded messages. The linguistic message contains words, 'Panzani' which in itself has two meanings; one the obvious the company the spaghetti came from and two the assumption of Italy. The colors of the vegetables in the image also help denote this linguistic meaning. In this section of the text he also talks about how the arrangement of the vegetables infers that the product being advertised gives you every aspect of a meal, causing me to re-think how I position things in my still life. Forgetting that if you put an object next to another object, people are automatically going to make a connection whether you want them to or not. Barthes then moves on to talk about the coded message of the image. The coded message is that of which the objects in the image connotate, such as the fruit being fresh, plentiful, referencing Italy, all things that are easily read by looking at the image. Things that any person with knowledge of food and its culture would pick up on. The last message, the non-coded message is the more abstract way of reading the message. Thinking about what it is as a whole as opposed to looking at specific things in the image and drawing what you know from them. It is about the whole image and why they placed things together in the way that they did.
This article was hard to grasp for me, but once having read it two or three times I finally picked up on what he was trying to say. This article really made me think more deeply about what my pictures are saying. Now i feel that i can more easily make every aspect of the picture intentional as opposed to saying "oh, i didn't even see that in the image." Every thing in the image is going to be noticed and someone will comment on it and wonder why the artist chose to put that object in a certain place, or why use the colors that they did, or why the composition is as it is.