'mere image' is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to refer to something that is powerless, insignificant, or without substance. For example, "The painting was just a mere image of what he had actually seen."
The mere image of Chris Evans and a saddle is enough to turn anyone's stomach.
"It was like the face of a statue, fixed, perdurable, a mere image of irresponsible and involuntary authority".
If anything, what is causing the most fear in our country is a mere image — the graphical image of that up-and-down stock-market line graph, careening over time to new lows and temporary highs.
The condition is named for Narcissus, a beautiful youth in Greek mythology who fell in love with his own reflection and then pined away, not realizing the object of his fancy was a mere image.
Another former G.I., who had been a German prisoner for more than a year, reported to the company a decade later that the mere image of Coke had given him the will to live.
Though less talented than Paul, Alice, a college graduate, was buoyed by the tide of praise that accompanied the genteel, race-lifting achievements of an increasing number of educated black women who were expected to do for the race what Alice's mere image had done for Paul.
Instead of precious cultural treasures, he believed that from now on works of art would be mere images circulating freely.
The interference effect, these optimists speculate, might be exploited to create holograms (that is, three-dimensional photographs) of actual matter, rather than mere images.
We cannot allow the world, reconstituted through the new media, to turn into mere images, pixels on the screen.
Some scholars take this to be a deflationary attack on traditional theology as based on mere images (Barnes 1982, pp. 456 61), but others suppose that the theory posits that these eidôla are really living beings (Taylor 1999a, pp. 211 6).
This resolution, Quayola insists, makes the prints more akin to objects than mere images.
