Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Roland Barthes: Mythologies 123
Formerly, the image illustrated the text (made it clearer); today, the text loads the
image, burdening it with culture, a moral, an imagination. Formerly, there was
reduction from text to image; today, there is amplification from one to the other.
The connotation is now experienced only as the natural resonance of the fundamental
denotation constituted by the photographic analogy and we are thus confronted
with a typical process of naturalisation of the cultural (Barthes, 1977a: 26).
In other words, image does not illustrate text, it is the text which amplifies the connotative
potential of the image. He refers to this process as ‘relay’. The relationship can
of course work in other ways. For example, rather than ‘amplifying a set of connotations
already given in the photograph . . . the text produces (invents) an entirely new
signified which is retroactively projected into the image, so much so as to appear
denoted there’ (27). An example might be a photograph taken in 2007 (see Figure 6.1)
of a rock star looking reflective, and originally used to promote a love song: ‘My baby
done me wrong’. In late 2008 the photograph is reused to accompany a newspaper
account of the death by a drug overdose of one of the rock star’s closest friends. The
photograph is recaptioned: ‘Drugs killed my best friend’ (see Figure 6.2). The caption
would feed into the image producing (inventing) connotations of loss, despair, and a
certain thoughtfulness about the role of drugs in rock music culture. Barthes refers to
this process as ‘anchorage’. What this example of the different meanings made of the
same photograph of the rock star reveals, as noted earlier, is the polysemic nature of all
signs: that is, their potential for multiple signification. Without the addition of a linguistic
text the meaning of the image is very difficult to pin down. The linguistic message
works in two ways. It helps the reader to identify the denotative meaning of the
image: this is a rock star looking reflective. Second, it limits the potential proliferation
of the connotations of the image: the rock star is reflective because of the drug overdose
by one of his closest friends. Therefore, the rock star is contemplating the role of
drugs in rock music culture. Moreover, it tries to make the reader believe that the connotative
meaning is actually present at the level of denotation.
Figure 6.1 Rock-a-day Johnny ‘My baby done me wrong’ from the album Dogbucket
Days.