Andy Warhol is well know for his “factory” that mass-produced images the way capitalist corporations mass produce consumer goods. But he was not the first artist to do this. In fact, a Frenchman did a similar thing, more than a 100 years earlier in London. His name was Camille Silvy. The National Portrait Gallery have an exhibition devoted to him at the moment and it is well worth a visit.
Not many people have heard of Camille Silvy. You won’t find him on Wikipedia. And this is the first retrospective of his work. Many of the images have not been seen in public since 1860. But Silvy was a pioneer of early photography and one of the greatest French photographers of the nineteenth century.
Silvy was born in France in 1834 and first took up a diplomatic post in the French foreign office. He became interested in photography while posted to Algeria and exhibited to great success at the first ever Salon of photography in Paris. In 1859 he moved to London and took over a photographic studio in Bayswater.
For the next then years, Silvy ran a portrait “factory”, where he pioneered theater, fashion, military and street photography. Working under the patronage of Queen Victoria, he photographed royalty, aristocrats and celebrities. He also portrayed uncelebrated people, the professional classes and country gentry, their wives, children and servants. Between 1859 and 1868, Silvy’s studio took over 17,000 portraits and sold more than a million prints. He did this using glass negatives that had to be dried in the sunlight, in his back garden.
The man’s achievements don’t end there. Over a century before the invention of Photoshop, Silvy created photographic illusions by using darkroom tricks. The photograph entitled “Twilight”, which is used on the Gallery’s publicity material to promote the exhibition, was shot in London. Its believed he used 4 different glass negatives to create the image, 1 for the street lamp, 1 for the foggy background, 1 for the people and 1 for the architecture. The photo also includes what is believed to be the first deliberate use of blurring.
At the age of 35, Silvy abruptly retired from photography. He returned to France, and after a brief stint in the army, spent much of the rest of his life in and out of asylums, suffering from manic depression. It has been suggested that the chemicals used in these pioneering decades of photography caused his mental illness; but I wonder if depression was not at the root of both his staggering output and his later withdrawal.
The exhibition is well put together. It draws on works from public and private collections including that belonging to Silvy’s descendants, seen for the first time, along with a cache of letters in which Silvy describes to his parents how he set up and ran his London studio. It also contains a remarkable selection of daybooks, that provide a unique record of the day to day workings of Silvy’s studio. The daybooks were bought by the National Portrait Gallery in 1904 and are among the rarely seen treasures of the Gallery’s photography collection.
The literature to promote the exhibition says it “will illustrate the transformation of photographic art into industry, the beginnings of the democratisation of portraiture and the life of this photographic genius who fell into obscurity. I couldn’t agree more.
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I too was impressed and intrigued by the Silvy exhibition; the ingenuity of the man of his time and I too was left with the impression that he would have used, if not even designed, Photoshop had the technology been around. He also is worth thinking about in the current argument over so called “air brushing”. He certainly manipulated images to get the most pleasing and in his eyes the most natural looking picture.
I began working in photography when leaving school in 1959; then genuine air brushing was used by very skilled artists before I copied the artwork which became the the base from which future prints were made. Manipulation of images has been around long before digital “air brushing” was there for everyone to use. Is wearing a wig, using make-up or even wearing a corset “air brushing”?
I’d be interested to know Kelvin Brown’s thoughts, as he states that his aim in his reportage photography is to “capture things as they are.”
J.D.
Hi John. Thanks for you comments. I agree, Silvy would have used many of Photoshop’s features had the technology been around. Personally, I prefer to keep my photos as natural as possible, tweaking the colours, exposure and contrast. I mainly use Lightroom to do this. But that is not to say I don’t appreciate the work of artists who use airbrushing in a very skillful manor. Sadly, now days it is often abused and badly used.