Photography has transformed the way we picture ourselves. This text tracks the impact of photography on the formation of the self-image through the study of four literary autobiographers concerned with the power of photography. All four writers tried to reconcile the image with the self.

Yet Benjamin used them in his photographic conception of history, which had its testing ground in his often-ignored "Berliner Kindheit um 1900". And Christa Wolf's narrator in "Patterns of Childhood" attempts to reclaim her childhood from the Nazis by reconstructing mental images of lost family photographs. Confronted with multiple and conflicting images of themselves, all four of these writers are torn between the knowledge that texts, photographs, and indeed selves are haunted by undecidability and the desire for the returned glance of a single self.