ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book reflects the transformations in how photography has been conceived and written about since Sontag's day. It traces the historical and conceptual roots of what it calls "Orthodox Theory" back to photography's invention in the 1830s. Beginning with photography's pioneers, it moves through Victorian debates about photography's standing as art, turn-of-the-century skirmishes between pictorialists and advocates of the straight print, varieties of twentieth-century modernism, right up to post-war cultural criticism, which forms the immediate historical backdrop to the emergence of Orthodoxy proper. The book tracks the philosophical fruition of such thought through the work of Roger Scruton and Kendall Walton, respectively, and the responses to which each has given rise. To date, philosophy of photography has primarily concerned aesthetic and epistemic questions, and their implications for one another.