The oldest story in the world is that stories have actually been told since the beginning of humanity. Part reality, part fantasy, a story that has been spreading over time will come to us, today, with chapters, characters, and details that other people have been adding or removing. As the world evolved, many ways of telling stories were created: through drawings on cave walls; through using oratory and language to tell stories to whoever would listen; faking life on the stage of a theatre; writing words on paper and printing them into books; drawing and painting characters; or, lastly, taking real life images, static (in photography) or in motion (in cinema), so we could discover an imprint of it in front of us.

The first photograph is thought to have been taken between 1826 and 1827, in France, by Nicéphore Niépce, the inventor of an image development process (called heliography) before film rolls or the digital format ever existed. Afterwards, in trying to catch life in motion, Eadweard Muybridge photographed images of a galloping horse in 1878 and projected them in sequence, making the human eye believe that it was watching the same image moving. Cinema was born and it wasn’t long before the first cameras and projections in public rooms started to arise. The brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière filmed workers leaving a factory after a day’s work, and showed this movement to a group of spectators in 1895, thus inventing the documentary. Georges Méliès, a French magician, wrote and filmed stories created by himself, and in 1902 he projected a trip to the moon, inventing, in turn, fictional cinema.

A story or and its characters are always at least partly fictional (a film doesn’t replace real life and a photograph depends on the imagination of the viewer), but we can also say, at the same time, that they are also truth. When we hear, read, or watch a story, there is always a part of us (the viewer) that recognizes itself in the words and images. This is how characters are built: because come from stories with true elements and because they are also built with a dose of fiction that fuels the imagination of those who watch it.

Stories and characters exist, however, for more than just that. Although the desire to tell and come up with stories has always accompanied us, the birth of photography, first, and cinema, later, brought something that had never been seen before: the ability to print what we saw in front of us into an image, so we could look at it again whenever we wanted. With photography, we were able to fixate a moment of life within a frame. With cinema, we were able to show life in motion and tell a story with images happening in front of us. Whenever we saw a photograph or a film, we would thus discover a sample of life: something that existed in another place and time, whether real or fabricated. Therefore, a photograph or a film can be an example of life as it existed, without the intervention of the person who took the photograph or made the film, or also an image of an event constructed for the lens of the photographer or the director.

Is there a clear boundary between the real and the fictional? If several people see a photograph or a movie and are asked to describe what they had seen, each one will tell a different story. As we have said, stories live as much on the imagination of those who tell it as on the imagination of those who hear it, changing, from person to person, according to every new interpretation. Not all viewers see the same things. Others take the images and, with their imagination, add new chapters to the lives of those in it. In that sense, photography and cinema are also built by characters inside a story that, by reflecting life and tampering with it, makes us feel and understand life in a way that we wouldn’t be able to if we couldn’t watch them being reproduced before us in a reflection.