The photography collection of the Centre Pompidou today numbers 40,000 prints and has become one of the most important in Europe. It is now one of the few groups in the world able to present a complete history of modern and contemporary photography in all its diversity, with strengths in particular for the photography of the 1920s and 1930s, the work of Man Ray, Brassaï and Brancusi, the New Vision and Surrealism. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Paris Photo, the Centre Pompidou presents for the first time a selection of about a hundred works chosen to illustrate the highlights of ten years of recent acquisitions by the museum. It shows works by around forty artists including Richard Avedon, Valérie Belin, Brassaï, Andreas Gursky, Germaine Krull, Sherrie Levine, René Magritte, Marc Riboud, August Sander, Allan Sekula, Alina Szapocznikow, Maurice Tabard, Wolfgang Tillmans, Etienne Léopold Trouvelot, Raoul Ubac and Jeff Wall. Borrowing its title from the very first book in the history of photography, The Pencil of Nature, published by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1844, this presentation helps show that the photographic image is no longer only a reproduction of nature: it has become a marker of culture.