"Vilém Flusser may be spinning in his grave--with glee. After a decade or more of the Brazilian Czech-born philosopher's pioneering communication philosophies trickling into English translation and securing increased traction within media studies and digital theory, Yanai Toister's Photography from the Turin Shroud to the Turing Machine skillfully explicates Flusser's ideas about imagery. Toister nudges them further toward the forefront of contemporary thought about visual culture and, specifically, what photography has come to be and mean in the digital era. More than just a whip-smart lit review, however, Toister pivots midway through to bind the trajectories of more recent theorists (Kittler, Manovich, and mainly Flusser) into a single toolkit for current and future discourse about the medium. Toister's accomplishment in this compact argument is a steady, patient finesse in debunking old wisdom about photography's elemental nature and reframing it not just as a complex technical system but as an inherently computational one.".