The V&A's new Photography Centre opens with a history-spanning show

Ah, here it is – that slow filtration of joy that begins creeping through your body from the second you wake up on Friday morning knowing full well that the weekend is about to arrive, and it’s all yours. What do to, though? A quick potter around T.K. Maxx or could it, possibly, be the Saturday you shuffle down to Kensington to explore the V&A’s brand new Photography Centre which is freely available to the public from today onward.

The institution is celebrating its new expansion with the launch of Collecting Photography: From Daguerreotype to Digital a new show which they claim “explores photography as a way of ‘collecting the world’, from the medium’s invention in the 19th century to the present day.”

With other 80,000 archival images at its disposal, it shouldn’t be surprising that everyone from Eugène Atget, Man Ray, Bill Brandt, Walker Evans, Edward Steichen, Cindy Sherman Martin Parr, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Cornelia Parker, and even Linda McCartney, all feature in a broad-ranging but presumably brilliant show.

In addition to that, the V&A have commissioned Thomas Ruff and Penelope Umbrico to create brand new work. Thomas has turned in “a monumental series inspired by Linnaeus Tripe’s 1850s paper negatives of India and Burma,” while Penelope’s 171 Clouds from the V&A Online Collection, 1630 – 1885, 2018 is an exploration of, yep, clouds from the V&A’s online collection.