Texts do not signify the world; they signify the images they tear up. Hence, to decode texts means to discover the images signified by them. The intentions of texts is to explain images, while that of concepts is to make idea comprehensible. In this way texts are a metacode of images. - page 11

There function of technical images is to liberate their receivers by magic from the necessity of thinking conceptually, at the same time replacing historical consciousness with a second order magical consciousness and replacing the ability to think conceptually with a second order imagination. This is what we mean when we say that technical images displace texts. - page 17

Thus culture divided into three branches: that of the fine arts fed with traditional images which were, however, conceptually and technically enriched; that of science and technology fed with hermetic texts; and that of the broad strata of society fed with cheap texts. To prevent culture breaking up, technical images were invented - as a code that was to be valid for the whole of society. - page 18

Every single photograph is the result, at one and the same time, of cooperation and of conflict between camera and photographer. Consequently, a photograph can be considered to have been decoded when one has succeeded in establishing how cooperation and conflict act on one another within it. The question put to photographs by critics of photography can therefore be formulated as: 'How far have photographers succeeded in redirecting photographers' intentions, and by what means?' On the basis of these criteria, the 'best' photographs are those in which photographers win out against the camera's program in the sense of their human intentions, i.e. they subordinate the camera to the human intention. - page 47