Victoria and Albert Museum, LondonThe museum now has a worthy space for its spellbinding collection, which spans the medium’s history – from the Queen’s hippopotamus to Paul McCartney in his dressing gown
The first thing you see as you enter the Victoria and Albert’s newly expanded Photography Centre is a huge plate camera on a wooden tripod. It belonged to Henry Fox Talbot, the founding father of British photography. In an adjacent glass case, an array of his other cameras are on show alongside his notebooks and an original copy of his photography book, The Pencil of Nature. The centre’s inaugural exhibition is Collecting Photography: From Daguerreotype to Digital, but it is the process of photography that is the intriguing subtext.
