using react and json to upload images to rails

I have a form in a react compnent that includes an image. This component has an associated state for the form, it is quite a large and complex form with many nested arrays of sub elements that vary in length, which is why I do not want to use FormData().

state = { 
        recipe: {
            title: "",
            image: null,
            ingredient_groups: [
                {
                    title: "",
                    ingredients: [
                        {
                            name: "",
                            measurement_metric: "",
                            measurement_imperial: ""
                        }
                    ]
                }
            ]
        }

The state is updated with an onChange handler for the input field like the following

let {recipe} = this.state;
recipe.image = event.target.files[0];
this.setState({recipe});

This is then sent via an axios post request,

let {recipe} = this.state;

axios.post('/api/v1/recipe', {recipe: recipe}).then((result) => {
        console.log(result.status)
})

in rails I have a params method set up for the allowed params

def recipe_params
    params.require(:recipe).permit(:title,
                               :image,  
                               {ingredient_groups: [
                                   :id,
                                   :title,
                                   {ingredients: [
                                       :id,
                                       :name,
                                       :measurement_metric,
                                       :measurement_imperial
                                   ]}
                               ]})
end

however I am getting nil for recipe_params[:image] when I try to save it into active storage like this:

@recipe.image.attach(recipe_params[:image])

Is what Im doing even possible? Or is the only way to transmit this via a FormData object on the post. I would really prefer this to be done via a pure json method.