‘We do the rest’: Photography, Labour, and Howellsian Realism
In Suburban Sketches (1871), one of William Dean Howells’ earliest publications, the Sallie family take a boat trip down Boston’s Charles River and along the East Coast. Like an increasing number of bourgeois American families of the 1870s, they memorialise their ‘Day’s Pleasure’ by having a picture taken.1 Waiting for the exposure, they arrange themselves into ‘striking and characteristic attitudes’ for a ‘brief space of time that seems so long’ (Suburban Sketches, p. 150). The photographer turns his back during the exposure ‘as photographers always do, with that air of hiding their tears’ (p. 150). The resulting image, which the reader never sees, may be realistic in the sense of recording what was in front of the lens, but it will be unrealistic in that what it records are the ‘characteristic attitudes’ known as posing. Like Levy and Stevenson, Howells concerned himself with the social implications of posing, though, unlike them, he felt it to be something of a moral and political danger.