the pictures we see everyday contain way more than what we think.
a sarcastic italian joke says, to someone who is illiterate, that he carries a newspaper with him, pretending to belong to a reader category, but he can actually onlyREAD pictures...
actually reading pictures is probably something more complicate than reading texts.
this is where semiotics explains the whole intellectual practice of reading, through signifier and signified, denotation and connotation and so on.

what can we say looking at the picture released few days ago about the "assassination of George Bush"? advertising for a tv show, of course. but what other meaning does it carry?
fantasizing about an event using the codes of photojournalism, (black and white), with reference to other real assassination and attempt of assassination (president Reagan, president Kennedy, ML King, etc.) through the use of composition, consrtuction of visual language.
looking at structuralist theory we can see in fact how these codes are used to reach people minds.
structuralism is concerned with a universal kind of language where signs and images are able to reach everyone through a mental process based on common experiences expressed symbolically.
although the structuralism has been argued by the poststructuralist theory, saying that the language does not use universal structures and the nature of language is shifting constantly,
the example given by the picture of the assassination og G. Bush seems to work very well.
the codes of the picture are well recognizable by the western reader due to his past experience in "reading" this kind of images of past events associating them with the present one.