The Reality and Fiction of Images

Images perpetually oscillate between real and imaginary. This porous border reveals less a confusion than a fundamental characteristic of our relationship to the visible and to memory.

The inaugural disturbance

Has it ever happened to you, while watching a film or series, to feel that singular disturbance during a commercial break? That moment when you can no longer distinguish whether this advertisement is real, that is, intended to make us buy goods or services, or whether it is only imaginary, integrated into the fiction to address the characters of the invented story. This disturbance questions our very identity: who are we in this audiovisual space? How does it address us? At the level of our imagination or at the level of our reality?

This confusion joins what we sometimes experience upon waking from a particularly realistic dream. Did we live through this scene or did we only dream it? As Jorge Luis Borges wrote in Fictions (1944): “Reality is not always probable, nor plausible.” This indistinction is not accidental; it reveals the very functioning of our brain.

For our memory does not function like a library where intact memories would be stored. It permanently reconstructs the bonds of meaning from what is available to it, internally and externally. The work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio in Descartes’ Error (1994) shows that “the brain does not photograph reality, it constantly reconstructs it”. This permanent reconstruction explains why our childhood memories sometimes trouble us too: do we really remember that lived moment, or has our memory been constructed from family narratives, photographs, repeated anecdotes that ended up creating it in us as a reality that we would have perceived by ourselves?

The permanent reconstruction of reality, or the illusion of perceptual evidence

Our brain, as demonstrated by Stanislas Dehaene’s work on consciousness and Olivier Houdé’s on the cognitive system, is not capable of giving us access to a pure historical truth, a “true” memory opposed to reconstruction. Everything is reconstruction, including our present visual perception, which nevertheless seems so evident and objective to us.

We believe we see things globally and clearly before us, in the present. Yet the zone of clarity in our vision, the fovea, is extremely limited, covering only about 2 degrees of visual angle. What gives us this apparently complete and stable image of reality is a permanent reconstruction operated by our incessant eye movements, our saccades that sweep the space about three times per second. The Bates method of visual re-education, developed by William H. Bates at the beginning of the 20^th century, called The Art of Seeing, works among other things on this ocular mobility: a living eye is an eye in movement, never fixed.

Thus, even the present is already a reconstruction. There is no pure ontological perception of the world that would be before us. This selective reconstruction explains our perceptual blind spots and our projections. Have you ever experienced buying a car of a certain brand and suddenly noticing this model everywhere on the streets? The cars have not proliferated; it is your attention that has reconfigured itself, illustrating what psychologists call “frequency bias” or the Baader-Meinhof effect.

The multiple regimes of contemporary image

If we return to audiovisual images, we must distinguish several regimes that coexist and sometimes overlap:

• Fiction images propose invented stories in which we accept to temporarily believe, what Coleridge called the “willing suspension of disbelief.”
• Journalistic images claim to transmit a certain objectivity of the state of the world, even if Roland Barthes recalled in Camera Lucida (1977) that “every photograph is a certificate of presence” but also a construction.
• Documentary images assume their subjectivity by proposing a particular vision of the world.
• Social media images create a hybrid space where people stage themselves to play a role in a social space, which Erving Goffman was already analyzing in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) before the digital era. These images, within online “communities,” navigate at the edge of all these genres, mixing fiction, journalism and documentary.
• Finally, our personal and family images, supposed to keep authentic traces of our lives, do not escape staging and the incorporation of cultural references that valorize our own reality.

Each image thus constitutes a millefeuille of these different regimes. But the effect that an image will produce in us, the belief it will arouse, whether it is the reflection of a reality or a fiction to dive into, depends not only on the image itself but on the function assigned to it. The same shot of a villa on Lake Como can have the function of a personal vacation memory, or be a journalistic document on regional events, or the introduction to a scene in a James Bond film. It is the institutional and contextual framing that determines our mode of reception.

Fiction as constitutive fabric of social reality

This porosity between real and fiction in images reveals that our reality itself is woven by fiction. The anthropologist Jack Goody, in The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1979), showed how writing and representations structure our categories of thought. The sociologist Cornelius Castoriadis developed in The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975) the idea that “history is essentially poiesis, creation and ontological genesis in and through the doing and representing/saying of humans”.

Contemporary amusing examples abound. Groups like Gorillaz or Daft Punk have created musical characters that transcend their creators, explicitly hidden behind them like puppeteers. In Japan, the virtual singer Hatsune Miku fills concert halls. Fictional characters maintain active presences on social networks, interacting with the public as if they were real. In politics even, Albania created in September 2025 the first “AI minister,” Diella, minister of public procurement.

These phenomena are not anomalies but revealers. They show that the distinction between real and fiction is not a clear demarcation line but rather a spectrum on which we constantly navigate. The philosopher Vilém Flusser, in Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), affirmed that “technical images are significant surfaces that translate processes into scenes”. They do not reproduce the world; they produce it.

Rethinking the image beyond its technical dimension

The disturbance we feel facing ambiguous advertisements in fictions is therefore legitimate and revealing. It invites us to go beyond a purely technical approach to the image, what appears on screens, to consider its social and cognitive function. The image does not exist in itself; it exists in a network of meanings, uses and interpretations.

This awareness of the modalities of image functioning seems necessary to me, not to establish a hierarchy between “true” and “false” images, but to understand how we live our world, where real and imaginary are inseparably intertwined. Artists have well understood this, no longer hesitating to use real fake advertisements, real fake social media videos, creating transmedia universes where fiction overflows from its initial frame.

I hope this introduction to the complexity of image regimes is useful for understanding all the implications of images. It is not about unraveling the true from the false, an enterprise doomed to failure, but about accepting and understanding this hybrid condition of our relationship to images, where memorial reconstruction, present perception and prospective imagination permanently mix to constitute what we call our reality.