With their petticoats hitched up, five little girls in straw boaters paddle their toes in the sea.

The charming scene was captured on film at the turn of the 20th Century when photography was in its infancy.

The picture, taken by George Ruff Jnr, forms part of an exhibition coming to Brighton Museum.

A Seaside Album: Photographs And Memory records the developing face of Brighton and Hove from the 1840s to the early 1990s. It reveals a story of changing times, attitudes and art.

The 150 original photographs, a mix of beautifully-composed prints and everyday shots, are from a collection belonging to Brighton-born Philippe Garner.

In 1839, William Henry Fox Talbot in London and Jacques Louis Daguerre in Paris published their historic discoveries of techniques for fixing images made by the action of light.

Two years later, Brighton's first photographic studio opened, along with the town's rail connections to London.

Brighton's fashionable reputation attracted photographic pioneers like a magnet.

Helen Grundy, exhibitions officer at the museum, said: "In the same way the early film pioneers worked in Hove, photographers flocked to Brigh-ton. There was a ready market of people wanting their portraits taken. The light was right and, of course, it was made all the easier by the new railway."

Brighton's first photographer, William Constable, opened his Photographic Institution in November 1841 and built a portrait studio in his house opposite the Chain Pier.

William Henry Fox Talbot, inventor of the positive-negative process, took the earliest known photographs of the Royal Pavilion in 1846.

During the next two decades, Edward Fox took a remarkable series of Victorian images of Brighton and recorded news events, including the wrecking of the French brig Atlantique, opposite the Albion Hotel in June 1860.

There was much to record. The Grand Hotel opened in July 1864, the West Pier was completed in 1866 and the Aquarium in 1872. Studies by William Mason Jnr serve as an early documentary on fishermen, domestic staff, artisans and itinerant musicians.

In the 1860s, Valentine Blanchard took "stereoscopic" land and sea views and started the trend for commercial photography.

Views of Brighton and Hove became popular and sold around England and Scotland.

By the turn of the century, Brighton was a fashionable resort and commercial photographers took full advantage.

Mr Ruff Jnr specialised in natural, animated beach scenes, often of children. Charles Job experimented with techniques and his study of Brunswick Place in the rain looks almost like an Impressionist painting.

The development of civil aviation after the First World War allowed photographers to reach new heights with aerial pictures. AW Wardell published a series of postcards showing the seafront and the urban sprawl that lay behind.

When the corporation began a programme of slum clearance in 1926, it commissioned photographers from Deane, Wiles and Millar to document the work.

In contrast, Cecil Beaton's photographs during the same era showed Brighton's grand terraces, statues and its Regency history. Through the next decades, Bill Brandt, Felix Man, Harry Todd, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alan Irvine, Tony Ray-Jones, Elliot Erwitt and Lord Snowdon all recorded life, love and loneliness in Brighton.

By the Sixties, photography was taught as a technical skill rather than a creative medium. But Brighton College of Art, now the University of Brighton, bucked the trend.

Ethan A Russell made a photographic story published as a booklet inserted inside the sleeve of The Who's album Quadrophenia.

A Seaside Album runs from May 10 to October 8.