Reality doesn't give us images, images shape our reality. This is the theory of Bryson in Natural Attitude. He believes that images are not nearly reflections, but rather they shape the world. But how can we prove this idea is true? It goes back to the chicken and the egg. Will we ever truly know which came first?

Bryson challenges the idea that images are a substitute of the real. As a society, we assume that photography captures true reality. We judge the value of an image by how real it seems to be. This in turn causes us to devalue paintings from the past. We see a surface change but we don’t examine why it changed. We once saw paintings as a representation of reality; however, we now need HDTV. We need 3D and depth to believe the image is real.

As a society we fail to consider why an image is the way it is. Instead, we believe that photos give the impression about what was there, we believe it just existed. We must learn to consider the audience of the photograph and think about what they want. Someone had to play a role in capturing all of the images we see and we must consider the style they have used. Style and perception shape the image. Images become real when they're from the perspective we like.

So do images shape reality or do images reflect reality? This is something that we’ll never know, just as with the chicken and the egg.