It's better to fix the CWD to begin with, using dbSetDir( ".." ); or similar. Though the best way is to change the working directory of the application when it's launched from VS, by going to your project properties: Configuration Properties -> Debugging -> Working Directory, and set that to .. or whatever.
Quote: "dbLoadImage("Media2D//Image1.png", 1);"
Those should be single forward slashes, you only need to escape backslashes because backlash is the escape character.
so: directory/file.ext == directory\\file.ext.