When we snap a photograph, we think we’ve captured a moment in time, in reality. It is this experience that inspired Susan Sontag’s ‘ecology of images’, in her seminal essay ‘On Photography’. But philosopher Peter Szendy argues that to organise pictures, photographs and images into a system is impossible. Instead, we need to insist on the open-endedness of images. In doing so, we can better understand their relationship to reality.