ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how Orthodoxy and New Theory alike might respond, not to one another but to a shared test case, and what this says in turn about their respective conceptions of photographic agency. Recall the curious mixture of enthusiasm and millennialism that greeted the integration of new digital technologies into photography some quarter of a century ago—all that talk about "painting with pixels" and "photography after photography" respectively. New Theory, like photography itself, seems able to accommodate the challenge seamlessly. Analogue photography is clearly autographic in Goodman's sense. One promising strategy might be to appeal to Nelson Goodman's influential distinction between "autographic" and "allographic" arts. Analogue photographs consist of a dense continuum of information. If plausible, the autographic–allographic distinction seems to offer just what Orthodox theorists need—a principled basis for distinguishing between analogue and the digital cases. The chapter considers the implications of the two theories for photographic agency.
