Although many excellent histories of photography and its invention exist, few focus on the rhetoric employed in debates over scientific priority and the romantic construct of nature as the active agent in photographic processes. This article surveys the range and complexity of rhetorical claims made for the first practical photographic process, daguerreotypy. It presents a rereading of the standard and romanticized history of the invention, defines the daguerreotype as a made object and cultural artifact with its own supratextual rhetoric, and presents examples from the discourse of 1839-1860 that show how daguerreotypes were argued to be simultaneously equal to, superior to, and inferior to natural human perceptions and representations.

This article argues for the long-term value of client-based group projects in an introductory technical communication course. Survey results are presented from 73 former technical communication students with two to seven years of workplace experience. Lasting five to six weeks, these projects are a compromise between a briefer conventional case method and a more lengthy individualized internship or cooperative education experience. The projects reinforce research, analysis, and reporting skills, such as interviewing specialists and conducting survey research, that graduates continue to value highly even after years of workplace writing. When framed as such, client-based projects also encourage students to define and debate public policy issues.

The geological surveys of the American West in the 1860s-80s are photographically illustrated scientific and technical documents that impose colonizing metaphors upon "natural" areas and resources-metaphors that continue to be contested today in Sierra Club calendar views of Yosemite peaks and in contemporary Congressional ddbates over mining rights and royalties on public Westem lands. Photographic images by William Henry Jackson, Timothy O'Sullivan, and others are central to the survey reports and are here read not so much as products of individual artistic or aesthetic sensibility, but more as thetoncat products of economic, ideological, and political forces in the decades after the American Civil War.

Beginning in the 1850s, authors of American and British scientific and technical publications began to integrate photographs into their texts. These chemical and photo-mechanically reproduced images often functioned as the basis for carefully defined claims for truth. In the natural sciences, in microscopy, in medicine, in the emerging studies of psychology and the social sciences, and in the dissemination and promotion of technological accomplishments, the verity of early published photographs led authors to claim that an image could be equal to its referent in nature, or even exceed its referent when conveying scientific and technical information. This article presents a technological, cultural, and rhetorical history of published photographs based upon twenty-three images selected from a review of forty photographically illustrated texts published between 1854 and 1900.

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