A Story of Photography will present highlights of LACMA's newly acquired Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection. The collection of more than 3,500 photographs forms one of the finest existing groups of masterworks from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The exhibition, opening on October 5, will show over seventy seminal photographs by Ansel Adams, Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, W.H. Fox Talbot, and Edward Weston. Announced on August 11, the acquisition was made possible by a groundbreaking gift from Wallis Annenberg and the Annenberg Foundation in support of photography. In addition to acquisition of the Vernon Collection, the gift includes a contribution to a new study room, opening in early 2011, that will allow access to the entire photography collection at LACMA. Marjorie and Leonard Vernon were pioneer Los Angeles collectors who, beginning in the 1970s, amassed a group of works with global significance that especially highlighted the riches of West Coast photography in the early and mid-twentieth century. The collection grew over the years to include works by 700 photographers, with the earliest photographs dating from the 1840s.