Last week, the Science Museum Group (SMG) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) announced what they deemed “a historic agreement”: 400,000 objects from SMG’s three-million-strong photography collection, held at the National Media Museum in Bradford, England, will be moved to London’s V&A. When combined with the V&A’s existing collection of 500,000 photographs, the resulting International Photography Resource Centre, as they’re calling the new institution, will become the largest official collection of photography in the world.

The vast group of images, most of which are part of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) collection, will chart the evolution of photography over the past 200 years. Images include the first negatives and daguerrotypes, early color photographs, and work by British pioneers like William Henry Fox Talbot, inventor of the salted paper and calotype processes, and Julia Margaret Cameron, the Victorian photographer known for her mystical Pre-Raphaelite portraits. Historic photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Käsebier, Paul Strand, and Ansel Adams will also feature in the collection.