Is a photograph meaningful solely because of the context in which it is deployed?

Essay text:

A photograph has the ability to hold endless expression within it, expressing all its different facets when displayed in varying environments, backgrounds, and times. I feel that an image will hold meaning regardless of its context though changing circumstance will influence change in meaning. There is always a denoted message in an image, that regardless of where it is we can read and find meaning as individuals, there are universal understandings such as a smile, which signifies happiness. And there is always a certain knowledge to a photograph which we can read, for example a photograph of a cat sitting on a table and a bowl which is falling through the air tells us just that, but we can all add personal insight and knowledge to assume that the bowl is likely to brake when it hits the floor and we can all guess that the cat knocked it off, we can further assume that it is highlighting the cat is hungry and was looking for food, or perhaps highlighting the dangerous, mischievous curiosity of a cat, or purely a look at how the camera can catch a moment in time forever freezing a moment which in reality takes seconds to complete (a bowl falling of a table and hitting a floor), but none of the original assumptions are affected by context but by personal experience and knowledge, these ideas are only widened or reigned in through context...