‘A much healthier addiction than buying drugs’: The story of Elton John’s great photography obsession

He swapped cocaine for the flash bulb in 1990, emerging from rehab to start a stellar photography collection (for which he has his own full-time director) that now comprises 9,000 works. As the V&A announces a major show from his personal archive, Mark Hudson reveals how the Rocket Man gets his fix from the frame game

Elton John at the exhibition, Taupin and O’Neill: Two Sides of the ’60s at the Iconic Images Gallery, Piccadilly, London, in April 2023 (Richard Young/Shutterstock)

Earlier this year in Stockholm, Elton John performed the final concert in his five-year Farewell Yellow Brick Road world tour, bringing down the curtain on one of the most successful music careers in history. Yet anyone expecting the global superstar and hugely influential activist to sink quietly into the oblivion of retirement is badly mistaken.

This week, the Victoria and Albert Museum announced the biggest photography exhibition in its history, to open next May, which will be drawn entirely from the collection of John and his husband, David Furnish. Comprising 300 works by 41 artists, it not only features some of the most iconic images in the history of the medium, but announces John as one of the most significant collectors of the post-war era. “Everything [in my collection] has been chosen by me,” John told The Observer in 2016. “My curator will suggest stuff, but nobody goes and collects on my behalf. I’m not known for my restraint, but for me this collection is about love, not collecting for the sake of it or grandstanding.”

Certainly, as you’d expect from a singer-songwriter whose trademarks include diamond-studded glasses, diamond-studded jackets, and diamond-studded, well, everything, John never does things by halves. He began collecting photography in 1990 after successfully entering rehab following a 20-year struggle with cocaine addiction. He now has 9,000 works in his possession – a number that dwarfs that of many major museums – and which require the services of a full-time director. In 1993, he set the record price at the time for a single photograph when he paid £112,000 for Man Ray’s Surrealist masterpiece Glass Tears.