Camille
Silvy, Photographer of Modern Life, 1834 – 1910
15 July - 24 October
Admission Charge
The National Portrait Gallery
The nineteenth century saw an opening up of public places and spaces that, in parallel with the development of photography, has left us with a plethora of images in previously undreamed of quantities. Camille Silvy was born in 1834 and ‘grew up’ with the photographic process. The exhibition, Camille Silvy, Photographer of Modern Life, 1834 – 1910, charts his ten-year creative burst from 1857-67. During this time he worked in Algiers, the French countryside, Paris and London. Curator Mark Haworth-Booth explained how he and the other curators attempted to evoke a nineteenth-century atmosphere by displaying the photographs against pale-green walls. There is indeed, a haunting and haunted quality about the photos, many of them sepia tinted and mounted on broad, cream borders. However, I am less than comfortable with the subtitle of the exhibition: photographer of modern life, one that links it with the poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire.
Baudelaire was Silvy’s contemporary and compatriot, and author of The Painter of Modern Life and other Essays, an evocation of nineteenth-century Paris in essays. , Baudelaire outlines the significance of the flaneur, a person who walks the city in order to experience it, that is, a subject at leisure to wander at will and observe life as it unfolds. These photos by Silvy are commissioned, some by Queen Victoria, and are not the candid, direct observations of life that the title suggests. Nonetheless, Silvy’s commissioned point of view is one worth sharing. Perhaps the most beautiful photo in the exhibition is River Scene, France, 1858. One wonders how Silvy managed to encapsulate this ‘natural’ subject within the confines of a frame, the scene above the river mirrored so perfectly in the water below that it looks as if it has been painted.
There is nothing ‘untidy’ about Silvy’s light studies. There are three of them; Studies on Light: Fog, ‘Sun’ and ‘Twilight’, all London street scenes taken in 1859. Silvy created photographic illusions in these works by using darkroom tricks, the equivalent of our own digital manipulation.
The Misses Booth, 1861, is a simulacrum of Victorian sisterly affection – I just stopped short of the word sentiment here. I can go with the clasped hands and the softly smiling faces of all of the other Misses on display, but those crinoline dresses are simply horrible. Still Life, 1859, was Silvy’s attempt to recreate seventeenth-century Dutch art. Somehow, I find the dead hare rather refreshing. With the theatrical nature of his images, it was inevitable that Silvy was going to foray into photography in the theatre, itself. He photographed Adelina Patti as Harriet in Martha, in 1861, among other subjects.
One of the few credibly candid photos present is Reading the Emperor’s First Order of the Day to the Army for the Italian Campaign in the Districts of Paris, 1859. The Order had been telegraphed by the Emperor, printed onto a billboard and posted up for subjects to read – yes, the telegraph was their Internet. Silvy retired from photography in 1870, fought in the Franco-Prussian war and sadly, spent the rest of his life suffering from manic depression. He died in France, in 1910. The exhibition is open until October 24.
Copyright © Mary Phelan 2010