Enthusiasm for photography is growing worldwide. 1998 was the Year of Photography in Britain. Paris joined in December by staging over 60 photography exhibitions as part of Le Mois de la Photo. Paris 's Ecole des Beaux-arts has long included photography in it's curriculum and even the Sorbonne, among the most conservative of France's universities, now proposes two courses in the history of photography.

Festivals of photography are organised every year in Arles, Cahors and Perpignan, while national institutions are busy forming vast collections of photographs. Opened in 1996 and funded by Paris City Hall, the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, or MEP, already owns a stock of 15,000 photographs. Paris's Georges Pompidou Arts Centre has a large collection, while the Musee d'Orsay owns 40,000 negatives and prints, ranging from first ever photos of 1839 to Man Ray's 1922 death-bed portrait of Marcel Proust.

In 1998 Victoria & Albert Museum in London opened the new Canon Photography Gallery, which represents the Museum's fulfilment of a long and cherished ambition. It houses one of the great photo collections of the world.

This opening is hardly jumping on the bandwagon. The Museum has been collecting photographs for nearly 150 years.

As the first museum in the world to collect photographs, the V&A has a strong tradition to uphold. Indeed, the history of the Museum is intertwined with the history of photography. It was Royal Engineers trained in South Kensington who went out to photograph other parts of the world in the late 19th century.

"I suppose what really interests me about the medium now,"

says the V&A Curator of Photographs Mark Haworth-Booth,

"is the way painters and conceptual artists have moved into photography from outside. In the early days of the medium, engravers and technical draughtsmen - chancers of all kinds - moved into photography. Today it is the turn of the artists..."