Drawn By Light: The Royal Photographic Society Collection

Treasures from the world’s oldest surviving photographic society are to go on display in South Kensington, the site of one of the UK’s first ever public exhibitions of photography.

In 1858, the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) held an open exhibition at The South Kensington Museum, which later became the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Pioneers of photography whose work was exhibited at this first show from Roger Fenton to Lewis Carroll and Hugh Welch Diamond will now be displayed in Media Space alongside remarkable images from some of modern photography’s most influential figures such as Don McCullin, Terry O’Neill and Martin Parr.

This exhibition will also showcase key artefacts from the history of the medium – Nièpce heliographs, Talbot’s camera lucida sketchbook, The Pencil of Nature (the first commercially published book to be illustrated by photographs) and seminal images such as Oscar Rejlander’s The Two Ways of Life.