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The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. William J. Mitchell. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. 273pp. $39.95.
In a time when many shrug off personal responsibility for the ramifications of their actions, it is refreshing to find an author who weaves the implications involved in altering and creating images with the techniques in using the tools. In this well thought-out, extensively illustrated book, William J. Mitchell, Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT, begins by reviewing how we perceive, and reminding us of the persuasive qualities of images. People believe and are easily influenced by what they see. Our language even reflects this concept: "seeing is believing," "what you see is what you get," "I'll believe it when I see it." Mitchell points out that there has always been some latitude in this concept: the viewer of a painting or photograph assumes the painting might be interpretive, but the photograph represents an implicit truth, a proof that something existed at the time the camera captured the image. Viewers have come to trust data recorded by the camera. Judgments and actions result from this trust.
In the first chapter, Mitchell explains that in the world of imagery based on the analog concept of flowing lines and minute variations in intensity, this trust had merit. The possibility of altering an original image existed, but it took a bit of sophistication to accomplish this. Lighting intensities and shadowing had to be replicated, toning was difficult to blend. Cases of misrepresentation, such as the insertions of fairies in the photograph Alice and the Fairies (referred to in the last chapter) to prove the existence of the tiny ones or the erasure of the politically inconvenient Trotsky from a shot of Lenin speaking to a street crowd, were known to occur, but only in a minute percentage of the body of photographic works.
Digital imagery, however, is based on a series of discreet "boxes," a technique that allows insertions and deletions in an image to occur, if not easily, at least with much less difficulty than the skill needed to blend the flow of the more traditional analog print. The altering of digital images takes on a seamless quality as the original is updated to reflect...