The Museum & the Photograph

Public art museums and photography developed at a comparable historic moment in the mid-19th century. No museum had a more interesting relationship with photography in that period than the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Known originally as the South Kensington Museum, the institution not only collected photographs as early as 1853 but commissioned them for documentary purposes.

This volume reproduces the work of a number of noted photographers from the museum's collection, including Gustave Le Gray, Julia Margaret Cameron, Samuel Bourne, Eadward Muybridge, Peter H. Emerson, and Frederick H. Evans. An essay by Mark Haworth-Booth gives a historical overview of the photographs and the circumstances of their acquisition. Anne McCauley traces the parallels between the development of photography as a medium and the development of the public museum as a collecting entity, with comparisons of the V&A to the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Bibliotheque des Arts decoratifs in France. Using examples from the V&A collection, the book discusses early institutional attitudes towards the medium and early collections.