Image and Myth: a Semiotic Analysis of the Pictures on the Cover Page of Chelcheragh Popular Magazine

The objective of this paper is to offer an interpretation of the pictures on the cover page of chelcheragh magazine that is known as a popular magazine. This interpretation aims at decoding ideological codes of the pictures and discovers how magazine uses these codes to naturalize some myths. We offer Roland Barthes’s approach to decoding images as framework for a semiotic analysis of the cover page pictures of chelcheragh magazine. It should be noted that popular magazines represent the external reality according to their ideological stance. The present paper aims at investigating some samples from the cover pages of the Chelcheragh magazine in order to reveal the magazines concealed ideology. Methodologically, some six cover page images from among 144 images were selected based on the critical case-sampling model. When the validity of the sampling method was guaranteed, then we analyzed the samples in according to the above-mentioned semiotic methodology. Some of the results show that Chelcheragh magazine uses a critical ideology toward the dominant cultural order. The myths used by the magazine include myth of hero, myth of destruction, myth of transcendent femininity, myth of being popular, myth of motherhood, and myth of black exponential. Theses myths provide the ideological interests of the magazine and contribute to naturalizing worldviews and interests of the magazine. Such ideology criticizes the government’s policy on leisure time of the youth, National Broadcasting Corporation, air pollution; the government is shutting down of the house of cinema, and the ban on the women’s travel to foreign countries by themselves. At the same time, the images support the critical TV program called “90” which critically reviews Iran’s soccer league games. The images also, support the movements that are divergent in relation to the dominant cultural system.