Denis Roche, scientific fictionalism and photography.

Photography has long carried the burden of being treated as evidence: an objective slice of reality, frozen and preserved.
Yet anyone who has ever made or looked closely at a photograph knows that images are never neutral. They are shaped by choices, omissions, interpretations, and the cultural frameworks we bring to them.

Scientific fictionalism offers a compelling way to rethink this. In philosophy, fictionalism suggests that scientific theories can be understood as useful fictions: conceptual models that help us navigate the world without requiring us to believe they are literally true. They are tools for thinking, not mirrors of reality.

What happens when we apply this idea to photography?

Photography as a Useful Fiction

Under a fictionalist lens, photographs stop pretending to be objective documents. Instead, they become speculative constructs, visual hypotheses about the world.

Just as scientific models simplify, distort, or symbolise complex phenomena, photographs do the same. They:

• Construct realities through framing, lighting, and composition

• Symbolise ideas rather than simply recording appearances

• Invite imaginative engagement, asking viewers to interpret, question, and project meaning

A photograph, then, is not a transparent window but a conceptual model—one that reveals as much about the photographer’s intentions and the viewer’s assumptions as it does about the subject itself.

Denis Roche: The Photographer as Fiction-Maker

Few artists embody this approach as clearly as Denis Roche. His work treats photography not as a method of documentation but as a field of narrative invention.

A striking example is his long-running Pont-de-Montvert series, in which he repeatedly photographed his wife, Françoise, overlooking the same cemetery over several decades.

At first glance, the images appear documentary: a woman, a landscape, the passage of time. But Roche is doing something far more complex. By returning to the same place, the same pose, the same visual motif, he constructs a layered fiction about memory, time, and recurrence.

The series becomes a conceptual model—an exploration of how time folds, repeats, and contradicts itself. It is less a record of what happened than a meditation on what it means to remember.

Why This Matters Now

In an era saturated with images, many of them generated, manipulated, or algorithmically assembled, the idea of photography as a “useful fiction” feels more relevant than ever.

Scientific fictionalism gives us a language for understanding photographs not as truth-claims but as symbolic propositions. It frees us from the impossible expectation that images must be accurate and instead invites us to ask:

• What model of the world does this image propose?

• What assumptions does it rely on?

• What possibilities does it open or foreclose?

Photography becomes a space of speculation, not certainty.

Toward a More Critical, More Imaginative Image Culture

By embracing fictionalism, we acknowledge that every photograph (whether made by a human or a machine) constructs a version of reality. This doesn’t diminish photography’s power; it expands it.

It allows us to see images as active participants in meaning-making, not passive reflections. It encourages us to read photographs critically, poetically, and philosophically. And it reminds us that the truth of an image often lies not in what it shows, but in what it asks us to imagine