This study has asked in which ways contemporary fictions refer to and engage the topical remediation of analog and digital photography, and to what literary purposes they might be using this specific discourse. In answer to this question, I have suggested a shared concern with an aesthetics of trust and the extension of belief—from analog to digital, and from the photographic to the literary medium. I have used the precarious yet tenacious truth status of photographic representation—innate to both analog and digital technologies—to elaborate on the idea of a “contingent referentiality” (Klaus Stierstorfer), which distinguishes the semiotics of photography and contemporary literary realism alike (see chapter 2 of this study).

The novels that have been analyzed so far within this conceptual framework have made a rather explicit case of the continuities and differences between analog and digital photographic discourses. Set in the post-Y2K world of omnipresent digital imaging, they have their characters move naturally in a technical universe of digital video cameras (The Accidental) or online video streams (The Body Artist), while simultaneously drawing on the medium's analog tradition and foundational stake in the Real.