Intervening in longstanding debates about the impact of the shift from analog to digital technology, this dissertation rethinks an aesthetics of photographic space in light of the information age. I argue that digital technology is transforming the very “nature” of the photographic medium as we know it. Since its invention in the early nineteenth century, the photograph has been widely thought of as a “mirror” or “window.” Critics and scholars have consequently tended to focus on the medium as a tool of realism: it either provides proof of the reality before the camera or serves as a visual record of the past. I demonstrate the photograph’s parallel evolution as a site for constructing novel spatial models for looking at and thinking about the world. I show how the photograph—alternately figured as a grid, a map, a table, or a studio—continually undermines the dominant metaphors of its own transparency.

My central claim is that we are witnessing the definitive breakdown of a worldview built around the fixed mastery of perspective to one that privileges the dynamic proliferation of pattern. To illustrate this trajectory, I juxtapose the work of canonical figures alongside the innovations of current practitioners. The first two chapters outline and complicate the camera’s traditional tie to the conventions of one-point, linear perspective as a “truthful” framing of the world. Reading the photographic interiors of Eugène Atget and John Divola, as well as the “eye exercises” and “perspective games” of Lázló Moholy-Nagy and Elad Lassry, I establish the photograph as a tool for generating what I call “ambiguous space.” The next two chapters elaborate on this new paradigm for picture-making and looking. As the photograph enters the mutable terrain of the digital screen, space is rewritten as information. Tracing this other genealogy of photographic space, I redefine two key terms within photographic discourse: the “index” and the punctum. From the plant taxonomies of Karl Blossfeldt to the mimicry of the screen’s entropic logic and the “retouching” of physical and virtual space by artists Michele Abeles, Katja Novitskova, Sara Cwynar, and others—I reveal how crucial perspectival cues such as depth, scale, and a vanishing point infinity are being overturned. I address the effects of this loss of perspectival orientation for how we imagine ourselves as locatable subjects in the world. I discover this other “nature” of the photograph as a richly ambiguous and synthetic space—rather than one that is self-evident and realist—in order to illuminate the ways that photographic practices are reinventing the limits and conditions of how we perceive and organize space, both in the picture and in the world.