The image reconstructs reality, the image constructs reality

The video is a single sentence typed on a black screen: The image reconstructs reality. The words drift apart and are typed again, two letters shorter: The image constructs reality. Then they disappear. The whole piece lives in that small loss.

For centuries we have asked images to reconstruct the world, and they have always done something else. In medieval churches, frescoes and mosaics told the Scriptures to people who could not read, and an icon was not a picture of the sacred but a presence of it. Later the portrait became a stage for power: Titian’s Charles V on horseback, the countless images of Louis XIV were not likenesses but roles, built to be believed.

Photography seemed to settle the matter. For the first time an image looked like a trace of the real, made by a machine, and we trusted it. Yet every frame is already a choice, and what is left out counts as much as what is in. Susan Sontag wrote that to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed; Stalin’s censors simply cut out of the pictures the people who had fallen from favor.

Today, with digital editing and generative AI, an image no longer needs anything in front of the lens. I use these tools myself, which is exactly why the question matters to me. An image can copy reality, fake it, overlap with it, replace it, take possession of it. It is never reality.

The sentence on the screen keeps changing because the relationship keeps changing. What does not change is that someone always decides what we see.