ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the pattern of thought from its origins in the 1830s, through nineteenth-century debates about straight versus pictorial photography and their inheritance by twentieth-Century skirmishes about "pure" photography, via mid-twentieth-century cultural criticism, up to the immediate pre-history of its formalization in recent analytic philosophical accounts. By its end, the depths of Orthodoxy's historical roots should be apparent, and the chapter assesses its strengths and weaknesses. Given how widespread the intuitions underpinning it are, it is hardly surprising that it has proved resilient. The question is whether these intuitions should command the assent that they do, and what explains their hold if not. What is perhaps most striking about the Orthodox account is just how close it is to folk theory of photography. From Peter Henry Emerson's perspective, far from demonstrating that photography can be art, combination printing is an admission of defeat; it abandons the terrain of photography altogether.
