The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has announced that it has acquired the photography collection of the Gilman Paper Company, widely considered to be the most important private photography collection in the world, the New York Times reports.

The collection, which includes hundreds of works from the medium's earliest years and was assembled by paper magnate Howard Gilman beginning in the 1970s, will greatly strengthen the Met's photography holdings and make it, along with the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, one of the world's pre-eminent institutions for nineteenth-century photography. Officials at the Met would not say how much the collection cost or how much of it was a gift from the Howard Gilman Foundation, which controlled it, because of a legal agreement between the museum and the New York City-based foundation. But one expert told the Times that its value on the open market could exceed $100 million.

The collection includes some of the earliest photographs ever taken, as well as works by the likes of William Henry Fox Talbot, Roger Fenton, Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Steichen, Eugene Atget, Aleksandr Rodchenko, El Lissitzy, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Man Ray.

"It's undoubtedly the most important thing that has happened at the Met in the area of photography and is probably the most important thing that is likely ever to happen," said Malcolm Daniel, the museum's curator of photography. "For at least the last fifteen years, the acquisition of the Gilman collection has been our No.1 priority and goal."