Surrounding Images With Words...

Roland Barthes wrote about surrounding images with words helping to specify and stabilize the interpretations of particular images:
"All images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifiers, a 'floating chain' of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others. Polysemy poses a question of meaning and this question always comes through as a dysfunction....Hence in every society various techniques are developed intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs; the linguistic message is one of those techniques."
- Roland Barthes