HELP! What does this quote mean: "The relationship of photography and language admits of two basic...?

descriptions, fundamentally antithetical. The first stresses photography’s difference from language, characterizing it as a “message without a code,” a purely objective transcript of visual reality. The second turns photography into a language or stresses its absorption by language in actual usage. This latter view is currently in favor with sophisticated commentators on photography. It is getting increasingly hard to find anyone who will defend the view (variously labeled “positivist,” “naturalistic,” or “superstitious and naive”) that photographs have a special causal and structural relationship with the reality that they represent. Perhaps this is due to the dominance of linguistic and semiotic models in the human sciences or the skepticism, relativism, and conventionalism which dominates the world of advanced literary criticism….”?