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                                                                         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 funda-
                          mental denotation constituted by the photographic analogy and we are thus con-
                          fronted 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 con-
                      notative 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 connota-
                      tions 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 lin-
                      guistic text the meaning of the image is very difficult to pin down. The linguistic mes-
                      sage 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 over-
                      dose 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 con-
                      notative 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.
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