Vision is a reconstruction

We believe we see the world as it is. We believe our eyes capture an objective image of what lies before us, the way a camera would capture a scene. This is false. Our vision is a permanent reconstruction, carried out by a brain that assembles fragments, fills in gaps, invents movement where there is none. And if we truly understood this, our relationship to images, and the way we propose mediations through images, would be profoundly transformed.

What the eye actually does

Let us begin with what happens physiologically in our eyes, because this is where things become interesting and where certainties collapse.

Our eye is a camera obscura. It works exactly like a photographic camera: there is an opening, the pupil, through which light rays enter. These rays pass through the crystalline lens, which plays the role of the objective, and form an inverted image on the retina at the back of the eye, which is the equivalent of the photographic sensor. So far, nothing surprising. But what comes next is where things get interesting.

On the retina, there are two types of receptor cells: cones, which are sensitive to colour and detail, and rods, which are sensitive to contrast and movement. The cones, which give us sharp, coloured vision, are concentrated in an extremely small area of the retina called the fovea. The fovea covers only about two degrees of visual angle. That is roughly the size of a thumbnail held at arm’s length. Outside this tiny zone, we do not see sharply. We perceive movement, contrasts, vague shapes, but no detail.

You will tell me: that is impossible, I see everything sharp in front of me. I look at this page and everything is sharp — the words, the margins, the background. No. It is not sharp. It is your brain giving you the illusion that it is sharp, by reconstructing a global image from fragments captured through a succession of extremely rapid eye movements. Your eyes move constantly, through saccades that physiologists estimate at about three per second. With each saccade, the fovea lands on a new point and captures a sharp fragment. And your brain assembles all these fragments into an image that seems continuous, stable, complete. But this image exists nowhere other than in your brain. It is not in front of you. It is inside you.

The art of seeing

Doctor William Horatio Bates, a New York ophthalmologist from the early twentieth century, was one of the first to draw practical consequences from this physiological reality. By observing the visual behaviour of his patients, he found that people who see well have eyes in permanent movement, relaxed, sweeping the visual field with ease. And that people who see poorly have tense, fixed eyes, trying to see everything sharp at once — which is physiologically impossible since only the fovea sees sharply and it covers just two degrees.

Bates drew from this a method of visual education that he called, significantly, the art of seeing. Not a correction technique, but an art. His central idea is that natural vision rests on three principles: relaxation, permanent mobility of the gaze, and awareness of the difference between central vision (what the fovea captures sharply) and peripheral vision (everything else in the visual field, perceived but not seen sharply). The living eye is an eye in movement, never fixed. Fixity of gaze is the enemy of vision. When we try to see everything sharp at the same time, we produce a tension that degrades our perception. When we accept seeing only one point sharply at a time, letting our gaze move freely, vision relaxes and improves.

What is remarkable about Bates’s approach, and what distinguishes it from classical ophthalmology, is that it considers vision not as a passive optical mechanism but as an active process, linked to the entire body, to the mind, to emotions, to stress. Vision is not the simple reception of an image by a sensor. It is an activity of the whole subject. We do not see only with our eyes: we see with our attention, our memory, our imagination, our emotional state. As Bates method teachers put it: “The eyes receive information from our environment, but it is the brain that processes it.” Sight concerns measurable acuity. Vision encompasses the capacity to visualise, to interpret, to understand, to assimilate, and to connect to memory the information received by the eyes.

This distinction between sight and vision is fundamental to our subject. Because when we work with images in mediation, we are not working with sight. We are working with vision. That is, with the entire apparatus of interpretation, memory, imagination, and emotion that means two people placed before the same image do not see the same thing.

The illusion of movement

There is another phenomenon that spectacularly illustrates the reconstructive nature of our vision: the illusion of movement in cinema. When we watch a film, we believe we see movement. People walking, cars driving, leaves stirring in the wind. In reality, there is no movement on the screen. There is only a succession of still images, projected at a sufficient rate — roughly sixteen images per second at minimum — for our brain to fuse these successive stages into an illusion of continuous movement.

This illusion is so powerful that we forget it constantly. Nobody, while watching a film, thinks: “I am looking at still images.” The movement seems as real to us as the movement of a person walking past us in the street. And yet it is a fabrication of our brain, not a property of the image. Thomas Edison had understood this as early as 1891 when he invented the kinetoscope. The Lumière brothers had understood it in 1895 with the cinematograph. But we, as viewers, forget it with every film. The brain does not let us see what it does. It delivers the result — the illusion — and hides the process.

What this means is that our visual experience is never direct access to reality. It is always a construction, a montage, an interpretation. The brain does not show us the world: it tells us the world. And it tells it from partial fragments, memories, expectations, projections. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, in Descartes’ Error (1994), showed that perception and emotion are inseparable: we do not first perceive and then react. Perception is already coloured by emotion. What we see depends on what we feel, what we expect, what we have lived through.

The car you notice everywhere

There is an experience everyone has had that perfectly illustrates this phenomenon. You buy a car of a certain model, and suddenly you see that model everywhere in the streets. The cars have not proliferated. It is your attention that has reconfigured itself. What psychologists call “frequency bias” or the Baader-Meinhof effect shows that our perception of the world is filtered by our preoccupations, our interests, our emotional investments. We do not see what is there. We see what we are disposed to see.

This was theorised by the psychologist Jerome Bruner as early as the 1940s in his work on perception: perception is not a passive recording of stimuli but an act of active categorisation, guided by the expectations, needs, and values of the subject. We perceive what we are ready to perceive. And what we are not ready to perceive, we simply do not see, even if it is right before our eyes. Experiments on inattentional blindness, such as the famous “invisible gorilla” by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris (1999), where half the viewers fail to see a gorilla crossing the screen while they are counting basketball passes, provide the most striking experimental demonstration of this.

There is no such thing as an objective image

If our vision itself is a reconstruction, then the images we produce with machines cannot be objective either. A camera has a lens, an angle, lighting, sensitivity, automatic settings, and now artificial intelligence processing built into the hardware. The image it produces is the result of all these technical mediations. And the image we perceive when we look at that photograph is the result of a second mediation — that of our brain, which interprets, completes, projects.

There is therefore a double reconstruction: that of the machine which fabricates the image, and that of the brain which receives it. At no point in this chain is there direct access to an objective reality. The image is not a mirror of the real. It is a technical artefact interpreted by a biological organism. Two layers of construction, two layers of bias, two layers of selection.

This reality, which philosophers of the image have known well since the work of Vilém Flusser (Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 1983), has immense implications for mediation. If we believe that images are transparent windows onto reality, we handle them naively. If we understand that they are constructions, we can approach them with the critical awareness and creative freedom they deserve.

What the viewer brings to the image

And here is the most direct consequence for mediation: what we see in an image tells as much about us as about what is photographed. Our perception is active, selective, projective. When I look at a photograph, I do not passively receive content. I bring to it my expectations, my memories, my fears, my desires, my preoccupations of the moment. As the psychoanalyst Ernst Kris, one of the pioneers of the psychology of art, put it: “We only see what we look at, and we only look at what preoccupies us.”

This is why, in the collective viewing workshops I run, ten people placed before the same photograph see ten different things. One sees freedom, another sees confinement. One sees a door opening, another sees a door closing. And both are right. Because the image does not contain a single meaning deposited by the author that we would need to recover. The image is a field of interpretive possibilities, and each gaze takes from it what concerns it.

Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida (1980), distinguished the studium — what in the image belongs to shared culture and can be read by everyone — from the punctum, that detail which pierces the viewer personally, which touches them without their always knowing why. The punctum is not in the image. It is in the encounter between the image and the person. And each person has their own punctum. This is the experimental proof, lived in every workshop, that vision is indeed a subjective reconstruction, not an objective recording.

The consequences for mediation

If vision is a reconstruction, if the image is not objective, if what we see tells as much about us as about what is shown, then mediation through images is not a transmission of visual contents. It is a bringing-together of singular gazes with visual artefacts, within a framework that allows this encounter to produce something.

And that something is not knowledge about the image. It is knowledge about oneself. When I say what I see in someone else’s photograph, I am speaking about myself as much as about the image. And when I hear what others see in my photograph, I learn something about myself that I did not know, because the machine captured things I had not decided and the gazes of others reveal them.

This mechanism is powerful because it is physiological before it is psychological. It is not a theory of subjectivity. It is a biological fact: our brain does not give us access to a pure reality. It gives us access to its reconstruction of reality. And this reconstruction is personal, unique, irreducibly singular. This is why the exercise of collective viewing, where each person says what they see in an image, is not an exercise in good manners, a pleasant little round of sharing impressions. It is an experimental demonstration — embodied, lived — that the world is not the same for everyone. And this demonstration, when carried out within a framework of trust, is one of the most powerful media education experiences one can offer, and also one of the most structuring experiences in therapeutic terms, because it says to each person: your gaze is unique, what you see is legitimate, and your vision of the world has its place in the common space.

Bates’s invitation

There is something in Bates’s approach that unexpectedly meets the ethics of mediation. Bates says: seeing is not an effort. You do not see better by trying harder. You see better by relaxing, by letting your gaze move freely, by accepting that not everything can be sharp at the same time. The teacher Sonia Djaoui, who teaches the Bates method, asks this question: “Seeing requires no effort? Do you make an effort to taste the piece of chocolate on your tongue?”

This invitation to non-will in the act of seeing echoes what I advocate in mediation: letting go as a condition for discovery. When you invite people to take a photograph in fifteen minutes on a given theme, the most important advice you can give them is: do not look for the subject in your head. Go out, let yourself be inspired by what the world offers you. Do not force it. Let your gaze wander. And when something catches you, even if you do not know why, take the photograph. This is exactly the art of seeing according to Bates: a relaxed attention, a mobility of the gaze, a trust in what comes rather than in what you seek.

Bates method teachers say that our mental preoccupations clutter our brain and prevent it from integrating images from the outside world, and that this mental state affects the natural mobility of the eyes. This is a sentence that could describe exactly what happens when someone enters a photography workshop with too many preconceptions, too much pressure, too much desire to do well. The gaze freezes. Creativity stalls. The person no longer sees anything because they are looking too hard for something specific.

Vision, in the fullest sense of the word — meaning not just sight but the capacity to interpret, to understand, to connect to memory and imagination — is a global act that engages the body, the mind, the emotions, the state of relaxation or tension. And mediation through images, when it works well, is precisely a space where this global vision can unfold: a space of sufficient relaxation for the gaze to free itself, a framework of sufficient trust for each person’s singular interpretation to dare express itself, a moment of shared presence where we discover, together, that we do not see the same world — and that this diversity is our most precious wealth.