The Victoria and Albert museum is opening a new gallery dedicated to the history of photography from it's invention in 1839 up to the 1960's and plans to refresh the collection every 18 months.

The gallery will launch with two exhibitons - one tracing the career of Victorian portrait photographer Julia Margret Cameron and the other showing the work of street photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.

The announcement has been welcomed by the photography world, because, in 1856, the V&A became the first museum to collect photographs and in 1858 was the first to exhibit them. It owns one of the largest and most important collections of photography in the world.