Met acquires early photos

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AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

NEW YORK -- The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York last week announced the acquisition of one of the world's richest private collections of photographs, including hundreds of important works dating to the earliest years of the art.

Composed of 8,500 photographs spanning a century to 1939, the Gilman Paper Co. collection is considered one of the most important in the world still in private hands.

The collection focuses on works by American, French and British masters such as Edward Steichen, Man Ray, Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, Nadar, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gustave Le Gray and Carleton Watkins.

The Gilman acquisition automatically makes the museum one of the world's leading centers for photography.

The collection "will provide our public with a rich and enduring opportunity to study and appreciate the visual innovation, expressiveness and sheer beauty of photography at its highest level," said museum director Philippe de Montebello.

Howard Gilman, a paper industry tycoon, spent 20 years assembling the collection.