Glamor and courage are on display at a London exhibition of photos from Elton John’s collection

LONDON – A new exhibition of Elton John photographs is everything you can expect from a star who has a fascination with images, a love of excess and a very large budget. Underrated, it is not.

The exhibition, which opens this 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 photos of Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, and Herb Ritts, portraits of stars such as the Beatles, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Chet Baker, and photojournalism that captures moments of the black movement for civil rights, AIDS activism from the 1960s to 1980s, and the September 11 attacks.

Newell Harbin, the couple’s collection director, agreed that the scale of the show is “a lot.”

“Sometimes it’s a little overwhelming, but it’s just wonderful,” she said in a preview on Wednesday.

The exhibition is titled “Fragile Beauty,” a name chosen by John that reflects his spirit, said curator Duncan Forbes, head of photography at the museum.

“I think the key for Elton is the feeling of vulnerability and fragility that underpins creative expression and the human experience,” Forbes said. “That’s the thing that I think permeates the show.”

He said John had instructed that the program “was supposed to be naughty and very serious”.

“What we tried to do was create a really absorbing big exhibit about photography, but also relate it to who they are (and) the collectors’ passions,” Forbes said.

The exhibition opens with elegant fashion photographs from the 1950s, then moves into edgier territory with works by chroniclers of outcasts and rebels like Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin, both artists John collected extensively.

Many of the big names from seven decades of photography are represented, from Diane Arbus, Eve Arnold, Bruce Davidson and Robert Franck to Wolfgang Tillmans, Cindy Sherman and Ai Weiwei. There are several works by Associated Pres 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 riots in Minneapolis .

John, now 77, began collecting photographs after becoming sober in the 1990s – he later said he replaced alcohol with “a much healthier addiction”. He and Furnish, 61, have amassed one of the largest photo collections in private hands, totaling more than 7,000 works.

They frequently lend photos to exhibitions, including around 200 for a Tate Modern exhibition in 2016, which 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 bit. The most recent piece in the exhibition was purchased two months ago.

Many of the works are displayed in a frequently changing schedule on the walls of his multiple homes. Harbin said the family had a joke in Atlanta, where John had a home for many years, “that no one ever knew the true color of the wallpaper.”

“I did it frame by frame, and that’s how he wanted it to be done — so that they could both be enveloped by the creativity and genius of these other artists,” she said.

“Fragile Beauty” is shown on V&From Saturday until January 5, 2025.