We have come to think that the first collector is the photographer themselves: a painter may be said to collect their own paintings, but these are too entirely the effect of manual decisions for that to mean much, whereas a photographer is first someone who, in the ocean of visual realities, chooses, and by this selective gesture has already committed to an artistic approach. A collector of photographs who is not themselves a photographer is therefore already, almost, a photographer, sharing the same necessary founding gesture of choice, which explains the particular weight of collections across the history of photography.