Photography, an Independent Art: Photographs from the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1839-1996
by: Mark Haworth-Booth

Hardcover. Princeton University Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 208 pages. The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) has one of the finest and oldest collections of photography in the world. In this fascinating book, Mark Haworth-Booth, Curator of Photographs at the V&A, offers the first comprehensive introduction to this extensive and impressive collection. In the process, he provides the reader with a general history of photography from its beginnings as a scientific curiosity, through its international commercialization, to its coming of age as an art form in its own right. The V&A's Victorian holdings are outstanding, with major photographs by Roger Fenton, David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson, Julia Margaret Cameron, Gustave Le Gray, Camille Silvy, and Lady Hawarden. In recent years, the museum has acquired significant works by such twentieth-century master photographers as Bill Brandt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paul Martin, Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and Cecil Beaton. A number of these photographs are published here for the first time