LOS ANGELES — Today, as the formal boundaries between the British royal family and the public narrow, pictures of 9-month-old Prince George are posted daily on the Facebook pages of Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge, the former Kate Middleton. But, in fact, photography has been promoting the royal brand since its inception in the 19th century, as an exhibition on view at the Getty Center here shows. Fame may seem a 20th-century phenomenon, but Queen Victoria was the first public figure to exploit its promotional potential and the earliest — and least likely — international celebrity of the photographed world.

Two years after Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, William Henry Fox Talbot, who vied with Louis Daguerre as photography’s official inventor, managed through his cousin, a lady-in-waiting at the palace, to get his photographs into the hands of the 20-year-old queen. Victoria, who presumably had never seen anything like it before, looked at the botanical images of ferns and grasses, and an ethereal gauze ribbon that she declared “very curious.”

Victoria and Albert, married in 1840, became significant champions of the new medium. When the queen died in 1901, she left a collection of 20,000 photographs that charted historic events, cultural advancements and artistic experimentation over the course of her rule, spanning the first six decades of photography. “A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography,” at the J. Paul Getty Museum through June 8, presents more than 150 images, drawn from the royal and the Getty collections, from the first daguerreotypes seen in England to calotypes, stereographs and albumen prints, by Felice Beato, Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, Francis Frith and Gustave Le Gray.

Countless official portraits of the queen circulated in the public sphere to symbolize the stature of the monarchy. Equally, a trove of personal portraits of her, Prince Albert and their nine children, which reside in albums and boxes at Windsor Castle, were distributed to establish Her Majesty not as a stern, prudish monarch but, unexpectedly, as a doting mother warmly engaged with her family. These photographs constitute a surprising visual record of Queen Victoria herself behind the scenes.