An exhibition of photographs owned by singer Elton John is everything one might expect from a star who has a fascination with image, a love of excess and a very large budget. Understated, it isn’t.
The show, which opened last week at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, includes more than 300 pieces by 140 photographers selected from the vast collection of John and his husband David Furnish.
Covering the period from 1950 to the present day, they include iconic fashion shots by Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and Herb Ritts, portraits of stars including The Beatles, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe and Chet Baker, and photojournalism capturing moments from the black civil rights movement of the 1960s in the United States to 1980s Aids activism and the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington DC.
“It’s a little bit overwhelming sometimes, but it’s just wonderful,” Newell Harbin, director of the couple’s collection, said at a preview on Wednesday.
The exhibition is entitled “Fragile Beauty”, a name chosen by John that reflects his ethos, said curator Duncan Forbes, the museum’s head of photography.
“I think key to Elton is the sense of vulnerability and fragility that underpins creative expression and human experience,” Forbes said. “That’s the thing I think runs through the show.”
He said John had instructed that the show “should be mischievous and it should be very serious”.
“What we’ve tried to do is create a really absorbing, big show about photography, but also relate it to who they are (and) the passions of the collectors,” Forbes said.
The exhibition opens with elegant fashion photos from the 1950s, then gets into edgier territory with work by chroniclers of outcasts and rebels, such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin, both artists John has collected extensively.
There are several works by Associated Press photographers, including Richard Drew’s haunting Falling Man image from 9/11 and Julio Cortez’s 2020 photo of a protester with an upside-down American flag amid unrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
John, now 77, began collecting photographs after getting sober in the 1990s – he later said he replaced alcohol with “a much healthier addiction”.
He and 61-year-old Furnish have assembled one of the largest photographic collections in private hands, amounting to more than 7,000 works.
They frequently loan photos for exhibitions, including some 200 for a show at London’s Tate Modern in 2016 that focused on black-and-white photographs from the early decades of the medium.
Harbin said John and Furnish “collect from the heart”.
“They collect what speaks to them,” she said – and continue to acquire new works, although they have slowed down a little. The most recent piece in the exhibition was bought two months ago.
Many of the works are displayed in an often-changing line-up on the walls of their multiple homes. Harbin said the household had a running joke in Atlanta, Georgia, where John had a home for many years, “that no one ever knew the true colour of the wallpaper”.
“I had it frame- to-frame, and that’s how he wanted it done – so that the two of them could be engulfed in that creativity and that genius of these other artists,” she said.
“Fragile Beauty” runs at the V&A until January 5, 2025.