ABSTRACT
This chapter evaluates each of the author's writers' perspectives on photography in the relevant historical context, and reviews briefly how those perspectives come through in their photobiographic writings. It then describes the various kinds of self that have emerged from the author's readings of their work, and shows how they constitute imaginative responses to technological developments and consequent changes in our modes of perception. The chapter presents some thoughts about how the photobiographic self might evolve in the future, in the context of the 'digital revolution' and its consequences. Using photography as a model aesthetic affects both the seeing self and the self seen: the former becomes 'objective', camera-like, and therefore structural rather than personal; the latter resembles a photograph or something like it, two-dimensional, a copy albeit a perfect one. Photography theorists as well as sociologists have written extensively about the differences between digital and analogue photography, referring especially to the ontological differences between the analogue and digital photograph.
