Roland Barthes in this reading breaks down the aesthetics of advertising images and even images in general. This reading was very interesting and helped me realize many features of an image or a photograph that I have paid very less attention to previously. My favorite part of this reading was how Barthes described images as “polysemous” because this is something that we often forget as audiences.  According to Barthes, “all images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifiers, a “floating chain” of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others” by this, the author states that all images can potentially have many small and larger images within which is very important for the viewer to understand the big picture. When we look at an image, we often focus on the main subject only to quickly understand the meaning but this meaning can be something completely different once you start to look at the various elements surrounding the subject. Barthes says that it’s completely up to the individuals to ignore or choose these different underlying elements of the image. Depending on the individual many may choose to accept some of this information and others may choose to reject but these choices can clearly make a difference in what the individual is understanding compared to the actual message. Most importantly to better understand the advertising images, Barthes states three main aspects of it which are, linguistic messages, denoted messages, and connoted messages. From what I understand Linguistic messages are the language or the text, any form of writing can be considered a linguistic message. Barthes describes denoted messages as those which are not coded and are easily identified because the viewers through signifiers will know what it is signifying in real life. Barthes states “e; in order to “read” this last (or first) level of the image, all that is needed is the knowledge bound up with our perception. That knowledge is not nil, for we need to know what an image is (children only learn this at about the age of four) and what a tomato, a string bag, a packet of pasta are, but it is a matter of almost anthropological knowledge.” This is non-coded because when we see a picture of a tomato, we know that it’s a picture of a tomato. Lastly, the connoted messages are the messages that can be understood through all the elements of an image. Connoted messages have multiple signifiers that signify the different aspects of an advertisement. For example, when we see a tomato, we know that it will be an ad for tomato but when we look at the colors and other objects and the writings, we start to gain more information. Colors can determine what condition of the tomato such as being fresh, cooked etc. it may also be an advertisement of a product made out of tomatoes. We learn all these through the connoted messages where we must think and identify the different signifiers in order to understand the bigger message. Overall, the reading had given me a lot of information which is kinda hard to grasp by reading it once or twice, but I will read it again to see and better understand what.