What strikes me here is nothing to do with the photo, and everything to do with the photo's context.
Though it is unwise to limit the universe by what we observe here on earth, it is far from unwise to extrapolate from what we do know and make predictions based on the principles derived from our own case; then, when these predictions are confirmed or falsified their shortcomings can be corrected using the new data, new predictions made to be tested in turn against the world and so on ad infinitum. This is of course the scientific ideal and is no more likely to operate perfectly in the real world than any other ideal, but as a rough guideline it's proven to be a fruitful method.
Now, what prediction can we make about life in the universe based on what we learn from life on our planet?
First, that - if it exists at all, it exists abundantly and in variety.
The reasons for this are simple. Life requires energy to sustain it; if it has no reproductive capacity is not alive; adaption and mutation over time tend to create interrelated systems of life that produce and consume energy. Plants consume sunlight; animals consume plants; bigger animals consume smaller animals - yes, the food chain works. If there isn't enough life to maintain a food chain, life dies out.
In particular, large complex life depends on a teeming network of simple life forms, from gut bacteria to insects, and these simple life forms in turn depend on us.
This is so true that the sparsest environments on earth, the deserts, support tens of thousands of species. This is all laid out in layman's terms here,
http://www.desertusa.com/mag05/feb/food.html, but you can confirm the conclusions anywhere you like. It's straightforward middle-school biology.
So it is a reasonable prediction that, if we find life on Mars, we're going to find a lot of it; and that if there's even one complex life form on Mars, it will be dependent on numerous simpler forms. And so far, we haven't found anything like that. No soil bacteria. No vegetation. No airborne spores. Nothing that leaps up and bangs its chest and says: "Hey! I'm life!"
This may be because all the life is inside; or because it's in a form we don't recognize; or because there's a massive cover-up; or because there's some important bit of data we don't have which would explain why life depends on other life in the Mojave but not on Mars; or because this is the last living organism on Mars, presently starving to death, and we're here at the tail end of an extinction event so mind-boggling we can't conceive it. Alternatively, the picture could be of a robot from Jupiter or an astronaut from Zeta Reticuli. I'm willing to accept all of these as tentative hypotheses, though my willingness to spend my tax dollars on testing them varies.
But under the circumstances, my bet for this photo is on "optical illusion" even before I see it, and nothing about the photo itself changes those odds for me.