Silvy at the National Portrait Gallery

Camille Silvy, a Frenchman who flourished in London during the 1860s, was a great celebrity photographer, among the first . As this exhibition makes plain, Silvy was a pioneer not only in certain photographic techniques, but also in habits of marketing and promotion that have since become standard. In his London studio, more than 17,000 portraits were made between 1859-1868, from which more than 1m prints were produced for sale.

At a time when each of these had to be printed in sunlight, such figures are extraordinary. They were possible only thanks to the carte de visite photograph, the small reproducible print whose explosive success was really one of the first marriages of photography with industry. At self-promotion and the promotion of his not-quite-art, Silvy was up there with the great marketing champions of photography, his friend the French photographer Félix Nadar first among them. Like Nadar’s, Silvy’s signature was a scarlet slash, an early confident brand. In modern terms, Silvy not only made his product, he made the market for it too.

As a result, this exhibition is only partly about the pictures themselves. It is also about the way Silvy carved out a thoroughly modern industrial entertainment content empire before anybody knew those words. The cartes de visite were at the core of it, and at the core of these was Silvy’s careful cultivation of theatrical stars. Silvy himself became something of a celebrity, and it is no surprise to find that he photographed himself and his family with great regularity. He often stands as the confident, almost swaggering embodiment of the self-made man (he wasn’t, quite, but his field was new and he was self-made within it). The latest fashions were modelled by his wife when they weren’t on the hot actress of the day (in a whimsical piece of exhibition design, one of Mme Silvy’s actual dresses is here).

The product of all this industrial energy, the cartes are fantastic compressions of ambition and self-identity, in which one often senses many of the sitters carefully working with the studio to achieve the “image” they wanted. One sitter, the comedian, actor, and balladeer Frederick Robson is seen disappearing into a large press or cupboard, an obviously professional witticism rather along the lines of the later Spy cartoons. Quite what the joke was, we need perhaps not ask. But the little print is a marvel of pale and dark composition and of frames within the frame.

Silvy promoted the photographic reproduction of artworks and made technical advances to permit it. Fashion, reproduction, celebrity portraiture, large scale photographic distribution ... all of these went on to become whole industries in their own right, and Mark Haworth-Booth, the curator of this exhibition, makes a compelling case that Silvy was in the forefront of them all. This is a wonderfully scholarly exhibition, and one that certainly moves photographic history on a whole notch.

I am not quite sure that Haworth-Booth managed to convince me of Silvy’s artistic credentials, however. His little 1867 study of the Angel of Sorrows from the Royal Tombs at Dreux is one of the most moving photographs of Gothic sculpture, a modest yet brilliant obeisance to the qualities the sculptor had wanted to put forward. But his studies of London light (“Sun, Twilight and Fog”) are pleasant but not much more than that. I loved the three prints on display of his most famous view, “The River Scene”, (1858, otherwise known as “La Vallée de l’Huisne”) but I found his still life studies of game not a patch on those of the Irish photographer Francis Edmond Currey, who made numerous essays on the same theme. Silvy himself was modest in his claims for photography as an art, and I don’t think in his own case we need disagree.

His genius, as this exhibition resoundingly proves, was as a modern. Silvy kept a royal autograph book as well as a special royal chamber in his studio ready in case Queen Victoria should visit (she never did but, as Nadar remarked, it was good for business anyway). For all that, he was a practitioner of the new trade of providing imagery on an industrial scale to the middle classes.

The presiding portrait here is of Théophile Gautier, who perfected the provision of another type of what is now called “content”: he was a hack, but a great one. Silvy was not quite the same. He was obviously a technician of genius, and remained a technician throughout: his dedication on one of the prints of the Vallée de l’Huisne, to Aristide Gouverneur, notes that “this print made with the help of salts of silver and gold in 1859 has not yet faded nor altered in tone at the present date, December 1869.”

This is magical material, brilliantly displayed. It has many pleasures, among them the small one of obliging the viewer to peer closely at tiny photographs. The National Portrait Gallery would have done well to have magnifying glasses for sale on entry.

‘Camille Silvy’, National Portrait Gallery, London, to October 24

www.npg.org.uk