surface?

“Images are significant surfaces. Images signify – mainly – something ‘out there’ in space and time that they have to make comprehensible to us as abstractions (as reductions of the four dimensions of space and time to the two sur- face dimensions). This specific ability to abstract surfaces out of space and time and to project them back into space and time is what is known as ‘imagination’. ”

Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 2000