Brought back to limelight

The National Portrait Gallery's Camille Silvy: Photographer of Modern Life is that rare thing — an exhibition that introduces a major 19th-century artist whose name is hardly known beyond a small circle of curators and collectors.

Wildly popular in his own lifetime, Silvy's dazzling career lasted only ten years before the onset of devastating mental illness. Confined to a madhouse for the last three decades of his life, he died in 1910, all but forgotten. Only in the last quarter of the 20th century did students of the history of photography fully grasp the stature of an artist whose exploration of subtle effects of light precisely paralleled what his exact contemporary James McNeill Whistler was doing in painting.

Born in 1834, Silvy entered the French diplomatic service before experiencing a coupe de foudre in front of a photographic display at the 1855 Paris World Fair. By 1859, he showed his early masterpiece River Scene, France at the first exhibition ever to present photographs as works of fine art.

Reading the First Order shows a dozen or so working-class men gathered together in a corner of one of Paris's cobblestone streets. The object of their excited interest is a message sent during the night by electric telegraph to the people of Paris from the Emperor Napoleon III, who was then engaged in a military campaign in Italy.

What purports to be a slice of urban realism is meticulously choreographed. Silvy arranged the men so that they formed a triangle. No film director could have paid closer attention to the fall of light, or to the positioning of his actors, all but two of whom are cast in shadow as they look up to the brilliantly lit poster.

Though you may not notice them at first, two of the men turn away from the poster. Lost in thought, they represent the intellectual and revolutionary factions opposed to the police state France had become under Napoleon III. Yet their presence in the crowd is introduced so subtly that when the photo was shown to the emperor he didn't spot them.

In 1859, Silvy left Paris for the relative freedom of speech and action to be found in mid-Victorian London. In London he established what proved to be a successful business providing carte de visite photographs. It is estimated that at least one million prints of photographs taken by Silvy were in circulation at one time and the distinction between the factory-like scale of his commercial production and his art photography is one of the most intriguing dichotomies in his extraordinary career.

The National Portrait Gallery owns 12 volumes of Silvy's Day Books, containing every commercial photo he took in his Bayswater studio between 1859 and 1867. These 17,000 photos are a unique souvenir of the 19th century, offering a panorama of English society.

Silvy's heyday coincided with the very beginnings of haute couture. He posed his female models to show their dresses by Worth in ways that would become the norm in fashion magazines that would become popular later in the century.

Important as all this is as social history, it is for his innovations as a photographer that Silvy should be remembered. In the London street scene Twilight, for example, he exposed four negatives to show a working-class boy and man under a gas lamp on a foggy night — a third, sinister figure that seems to be walking towards them in the background has been deliberately blurred for artistic effect. Silvy, like that other foreigner Whistler, found beauty in the spectacle of a vast city shrouded in mist.

Curator Mark Haworth-Booth does full justice to an artist whose career lasted only a decade from start to finish. Had a bipolar disorder not cut his working life short, he would today be seen as an artist of the stature of Edgar Degas. What a show. What a gift.

Camille Silvy: Photographer of Modern Life is on at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until 0ctober 24.