Bradford has trumped Los Angeles in the race to mount a major photographic exhibition.

The city's National Museum of Photography, Film & Television will play host to a collection of renowned Victorian portraits before they are shipped to LA's J Paul Getty Museum.

The pictures are the work of the celebrated 19th century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Many are from the Bradford museum's own collection.

They include portraits of Mrs Cameron's friends Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. A museum spokesman promised: "It will be a unique opportunity to see a remarkable contribution to the art of photography before it travels to Los Angeles."

Mrs Cameron, who died in 1879, is considered one of the first great exponents of the art of photography.

Born in Calcutta to a well-to-do British family, she was educated in France, and later settled in Sri Lanka where she and husband Charles acquired coffee plantations. But it was in the 1840s when the family returned to England that she first picked up a camera.

She had the greenhouse in her Isle of Wight garden converted into a studio and persuaded friends, among them some of the leaders of Victorian society, to sit for portraits.

Tennyson was photographed draped in a dark cloak, looking unkempt and weary. He said the picture made him look like a dirty monk. After Mrs Cameron's death, her work lay forgotten for decades. But it is now considered one of the most important collections of its type. The Bradford exhibition, which runs from June 27 to September 14, will include lectures on Mrs Cameron's pictures and the high-society circles in which she moved. A three-day international conference on her work will launch the exhibition.

Lesley Patrick, the museum's head of marketing, said: "This exceptional exhibition features more than 120 prints of Julia Margaret Cameron's work. The prints will never be exhibited in a better environment."