ter 1860 seems very much a matter of virtually continuous innovation, refinement, and enhanced understanding of the original scientific principles of light and chemistry. Jeffrey speaks to this point in alluding to what could be called the historiography of photography. Photography, he says, was from its earliest inception "and subsequently" referred to as an invention, although it "was more accurately a discovery of nature's capacity to register its own images" (Jeffrey 10). That capacity has become ever more refined, with the result that today,
there is scarcely an aspect of human activity in which [photography] is not used in one form or another. It has become indispensable to both science and industry. It provides the basis for mass media--movies, television, video. Thousands of newspapers and magazines print millions of photographs daily. Photography is now so much a part of our daily lives that our familiarity causes is to overlook it (Freund 4).
None of this should be taken to diminish the importance of original principles; quite the reverse. Rather, this basic technical foundation has enabled the multivaried evolution of both technical and cultural features of photography. Jeffrey's view of this is that the earliest photographers "were involved in a partner ship with nature. At the same time they were artists, and both they and their audiences were familiar with well-established traditions of picture-making" (Jeffrey 10). These traditions, of course, entailed axiology and epistemology (including and especially rhetoric). For photographers, the artistic project of making meanings was always in the background photographic composition and semiology, or manipulation of symbols. Accompanying text designed to explain meaning was also a feature of photography from the earliest period, although as Jeffrey suggests the photographic essay as a coherent artifact of culture did not appear fully formed or argued. The meanings made by p...