The Betrayal of Images: When Photography Deceives Reality

We're drowning. Suffocating in a flood of images that clog our minds and distort our reality. We live inside photographs now, sharing fake experiences—or are they imagined ones? Sometimes I wonder if we've forgotten what we actually look like.

Back in 1929, when photography was still relatively young, a clever guy named René Magritte created his famous work "The Betrayal of Images" (La trahison des images in French). It's a painting of a pipe with text underneath declaring "This is not a pipe."

Pretty straightforward when you think about it. It's an image of a pipe, not the real thing. Two-dimensional. A symbol. Ink on canvas that looks like something but isn't actually that thing.

How We Learn to See the World Through Images

Picture this: a parent sits with their child, pointing at pictures in a book. "Look, here's a dog. Here's a bird." This is how toddlers learn to recognize the world around them—through images, information, visual language sometimes enhanced with sounds. But this isn't the experience of meeting a real dog. Three-dimensional, living, breathing, barking, licking. The picture might be big, colorful, full of details, but at the end of the day it's just a picture. Just an image.

We've developed this incredibly powerful visual tool, a system of symbols that we've poured meaning into. But we forgot it's just a system—an empty template. And now that system has spiraled out of control.

The Limits of Photographic Truth

Every photograph is created under the constraints of the medium and the artist's choices. We have no information about what's happening outside the frame. The compositions of color, light, and texture convey certain universal and subjective information to us. So why do we treat photography like absolute fact?

The betrayal of imagery isn't limited to photography or digitally edited photos—it applies to every visual creation.

Photography provides an experience very close to seeing with the human eye, so it's not surprising we have such complex relationships with photographic images of ourselves. Another selfie, maybe from a different angle, maybe with pursed lips or slightly different lighting, with this filter it'll definitely look better...

Aesthetically, maybe it really will look better based on the genetic template embedded in us. But let's face it—it won't change the dimensions of your nose, forehead, that new double chin, whatever. It'll be a more aesthetic image (and aesthetics is subjective anyway), but we remain ourselves, with the same "flaws" and features. We just fool ourselves and everyone around us a little.

The Dating Profile Dilemma

A guy once approached me asking to retouch his photo for a dating site. He wanted me to make him more "attractive." According to him, the women he met through the site looked nothing like the photos on their profiles, so he wanted to play the same game—to deceive. That way he could get more dates.

I agreed, though I didn't understand the broader implications at the time. Someone thinks that if they change their external image a bit (or a lot), they'll be more popular on the site and get more attention, maybe increasing their chances of finding true love... or some kind of connection. But then what? You have to meet and confront the "ugly" reality.

Portrait Photography and Self-Perception

When I'm photographing someone—portrait work or headshots—some subjects will point out facial features they don't like about themselves. I try to create a pleasant atmosphere that allows for some humor, saying I'm just the photographer and maybe something like an on-set psychologist, but I'm not a plastic surgeon...

In most cases, that element bothering the subject is usually something only they notice, while it's negligible to other viewers.

I don't know what happened to that guy who asked me to retouch his photo. I can only say that even after I added hair, flattened his stomach, tightened his neck, and rounded his head, he still wasn't satisfied. I suggested replacing his head with Brad Pitt's, but he said that would be too much...

The thing is, we've created this visual language so sophisticated that we mistake the map for the territory. We're living in the age of the image, where the representation has become more important than reality itself. And maybe that's the real betrayal—not that images lie, but that we've forgotten they're just images.