ABSTRACT
Writing in 1992, William J. Mitchell argued that “a worldwide network of digital imaging systems is swiftly, silently constituting itself as the decentred subject’s reconfigured eye.” His analysis rightly pointed to the importance of transmission rather than capture. This chapter explores the indeterminate authorship and aesthetics of digital photography more than two decades later, investigating a renewed tension between automation and Pictorialism in a variety of contemporary practices. The chapter concludes by asking if the selfie, in which the decentered subject-photographer has internalized the position of the viewer, is the actually existing “visual truth” of Mitchell’s “reconfigured eye”?
