In Aperture’s fortieth anniversary issue, published in Fall 1992, there’s a brand-new book advertised in the back pages—William J. Mitchell’s The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. The marketing copy reads: “Enhanced? Or faked? Today the very idea of photographic veracity is being radically challenged by the emerging technology of digital image manipulation.”
Mitchell’s book heralded one of the most significant developments in the history of photography: the accelerating shift from analog to digital image formats that would, over the course of the 1990s and in anticipation of the post-truth dimensions of the present day, increasingly render reality as its simulacrum. This shift, Mitchell contends, has been as profound as that from painting to photography, in that digital images are produced through fundamentally different material processes than analog photographs. Whereas an analog image indexes light bouncing off a physical object by means of chemical
