640 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-photographic Era. By WilliamJ. Mitchell. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992. Pp. x+273; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95. William Mitchell has written a seminal study exploring the broad sweep of cultural, technical, and aesthetic changes that have accompa nied the rise of digital imaging. During the early 1990s, we entered a new era in which computer-processed digital images are superseding the uses of conventional photographs produced with silver-based emulsions. As Mitchell argues, these digital images have “such overwhelming technical and economic advantages” that they seem “certain to succeed the photograph as our primary medium of visual record” (p. 19). Mitchell’s study has several centers of interest. It briefly traces the historical development of digital imaging and offers an overview of imaging in a variety of fields, including medicine, science, advertis ing, and journalism. Several chapters provide a succinct survey of current techniques for capturing, storing, displaying, processing, en hancing, and printing digital images. Among the many topics discussed are computer paint systems, the use of filters, cutting and pasting methods, and synthetic shading for creating convincing threedimensional imagery. But the most provocative sections are the chapters dealing with techniques for radically manipulating and altering photographic im ages, chapters which chart the computer’s ability to produce seamless transformations such as adding and deleting people, objects, and sub tle details. Through the computer, today’s newspaper and magazine picture editors have found easy ways to produce these pseudophoto graphs, allowing them to create not only aesthetic manipulations but also modified news photos as well. (Though photographers have long used retouching techniques to manipulate images, computers today can do these manipulations much faster and easier. Furthermore, the increased availability of relatively inexpensive image-processing software for use on personal computers has made these techniques even more accessible.) As Mitchell notes, the ease in creating these manipulations has heightened the “temptation to duplicity” (p. 19), sometimes producing politically charged photographs in which historic fact is altered. As a comic example, the author includes a simulated photograph with Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin seated at the Yalta Conference at the end of World War II, nowjoined by Groucho and Rambo. A major strength of Mitchell’s book is its concern with the social and cultural impact of these manipulated images. Drawing on a variety of discourses—linguistic, philosophical, sociological—Mitchell explores the implications of computer images which can be “so easily distributed, copied, transformed, and recombined” (p. 223). He explores the com puter’s disconcerting if not dangerous tendency to blur the distinction TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 641 between fact and fiction, to produce manipulated, synthetic images that are often indistinguishable from traditional silver-halide photographs. One of the dangers in producing digital images that mimic photo graphs are that photographs have generally been considered reliable and truthful sources of visual information and have been used as exemplars of “fact” in photojournalism, medicine, and law. A crisis is created when photographs can no longer be trusted. Digital imaging, Mitchell compellingly argues, has “irrevocably subverted these certain ties,” revealing the “fragility of our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real” (p. 225). (To complicate matters, however, current photographic discourse frequently contests the inherent “neu trality” or “objectivity” of photographs themselves, suggesting that even photographic images are somewhat compromised versions of reality, compromised by their inherent selectivity and limitation to a specific moment in time and space.) Mitchell’s book follows an important earlier study, In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography by Fred Ritchin (Aperture, 1990), which not only mapped out many of the central issues ofdigital imaging and provided memorable examples of historically altered photographs, but also endowed the discussion with polemical fervor. Ritchin has been particularly concerned with the ethical issues of digital imaging, and in his writing and lectures has repeatedly called for changes, including a labeling system that clearly identifies altered photographs. Mitchell, however, remains somewhat equivocal. He details the efforts made by press photographers, filmmakers, and members of Congress during the late 1980s to evolve a set of ethical guidelines to regulate manipulations but implies that these efforts were...