LAUSR

A photograph appears in the opening scene of William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), when during his interview with Bartley Hubbard, who is writing a feature profile of the wealthy paint manufacturer, Lapham shows the journalist a “large warped, unframed” portrait of his family: “There we are, all of us” (7–8). Although the photograph is “warped, unframed,” and “dusty,” Lapham insists that the photographic evidence is up to the task of verifying visually what he has just been describing with words. Moreover, while a Lapham family portrait in the 1870′s would have been captured with a large, cumbersome camera using inconvenient wet plates, Howells’s first readers already would have been increasingly familiar with a rather different medium, given the rapid changes of photographic technology, convenience, and cost unfolding during this period. In the same year of the novel’s publication, for example, George Eastman (who had by then already developed both dry plate and paper film technologies) invented the transparent film that by 1888 made possible the Kodak camera, which was cheap, portable, and capable of taking 100 pictures, rendering photography available for virtually everybody. As did Howells himself throughout his career, realist writers and their readers ever since have variously linked photography and literary realism, as reflected in Howells’s own reference to Eastman’s “snap-camera” invention in a November 1888 “Editor’s Study” column inHarper’s Magazine (964). However, our attention in this novel is extensively directed to the other visual medium of painting, although this first scene literally grabs hold of a photograph to tell its painted story. Readers ever since have largely overlooked the photograph in Lapham’s opening hand. A relationship between painting and photography in the novel is prefigured in this first photograph not only in that Silas uses the portrait to talk about paint, but also because the photographic image actually depicts a painted surface: “The figures were clustered in an irregular group in front of an old farm-house, whose original ugliness had been smartened up with a coat of Lapham’s own paint” (8). The scene is variously painted, photographed, and verbally described. Put differently, the photograph is the medium by which Howells