Editing Victoria and Albert Museum (section)

===Photography===
The collection contains more than 500,000 images dating from the advent of photography, the oldest image dating from 1839. The gallery displays a series of changing exhibits and closes between exhibitions to allow full re-display to take place. Already in 1858, when the museum was called the South Kensington Museum, it had the world's first international photographic exhibition.

The collection includes the work of many photographers from [[Fox Talbot]], [[Julia Margaret Cameron]], [[Clementina Maude, Viscountess Hawarden|Viscountess Clementina Hawarden]], [[Gustave Le Gray]], [[Benjamin Brecknell Turner]], [[Frederick Hollyer]], [[Samuel Bourne]], [[Roger Fenton]], [[Man Ray]], [[Henri Cartier-Bresson]], [[Ilse Bing]], [[Bill Brandt]], Cecil Beaton (there are more than 8000 of his [[Negative (photography)|negative]]s), [[Don McCullin]], [[David Bailey (photographer)|David Bailey]], [[Jim Lee (photographer)|Jim Lee]] and [[Helen Chadwick]] to the present day.

One of the more unusual collections is that of [[Eadweard Muybridge]]'s photographs of Animal Locomotion of 1887, this consists of 781 plates. These sequences of photographs taken a fraction of a second apart capture images of different animals and humans performing various actions. There are several of [[John Thomson (photographer)|John Thomson]]'s 1876-7 images of Street Life in London in the collection. The museum also holds [[James Lafayette]]'s society portraits, a collection of more than 600 photographs dating from the late 19th to early 20th centuries and portraying a wide range of society figures of the period, including bishops, generals, society ladies, Indian maharajas, Ethiopian rulers and other foreign leaders, actresses, people posing in their motor cars and a sequence of photographs recording the guests at the famous fancy-dress ball held at [[Devonshire House]] in 1897 to celebrate Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee.

In 2003 and 2007 Penelope Smail and Kathleen Moffat generously donated [[Curtis Moffat]]'s extensive archive to the museum. He created dynamic abstract photographs, innovative colour still-lives and glamorous society portraits during the 1920s and 1930s. He was also a pivotal figure in Modernist interior design. In Paris during the 1920s, Moffat collaborated with Man Ray, producing portraits and abstract [[photogram]]s or "rayographs".