Portrait of a Rocket Man: Sir Elton John’s photography collection wows at V&A

Some 300 of their most significant acquisitions will be on display at the Victoria and Albert museum

Elton John and his husband David Furnish wake up each morning surrounded by walls decorated with hundreds of framed photographs. Their collection, including over 7,000 note-worthy pieces of art, lives with them in homes across three countries.

Now, 300 of their most significant acquisitions will be on display at the Victoria and Albert museum in the institution’s largest photography exhibition to date: Fragile Beauty, which opens in South Kensington on Saturday (May 18).

Like his rhinestone rimmed glasses and bedazzled blazers, John and Furnish’s personal photography collection is a lesson in “more is more” maximalism: black and white Richard Avedon portraits of The Beatles, Joan Didion’s high fashion 2015 Celine campaign shot by Juergen Teller, a close up of John’s own bejewelled hands by Mario Testino.

‘Elton John, Egg On His Face’ by David LaChapelle, 1999 (V&A/David LaChapelle)

John began collecting photographs as “a much healthier addiction” after leaving rehab for cocaine use in 1990.

While he was staying in a chateau in the South of France, an LA gallery owner showed him a selection of prints by Herb Ritts, Horst and Irving Penn. “He saw them with his fresh, sober eyes,” says Newell Harbin, director of John and Furnish’s collection. “And it all came to light for him.”

‘Dakota Hair’ by Ryan McGinley, 2004 (V&A/Ryan McGinley Studios)

‘Chet Baker’ by Herman Leonard, 1956 (V&A/Herman Leonard Photography)

In 2016, the Tate Modern exhibited John’s images that dated between 1910 and 1950. The V&A exhibition picks up where it left off, splitting the mammoth collection into nine rooms: Fashion, Stars of Stage, Screen and Studio, Desire, Reportage, The American Scene, Fragile Beauty, Constructed Images, Towards Abstraction and Collecting Now– a selection of their most recent purchases.

“[Elton and David] have a knowledge of photography that rivals most museum curators,” says the exhibition’s co-curator Duncan Forbes, who began scanning the couple’s photographs, all “hung very high on the walls” in elaborate “salon style”, while sitting at the singer’s kitchen table.

‘Simply Fragile’ by Tyler Mitchell (V&A/Tyler Mitchell)

‘Black Americans’ by Bruce Davidson, 1962 (V&A/Bruce Davidson Magnum Photos)

Of the extensive number of artists included in the exhibition, John has outlined provocative sadomasochist Robert Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989, and activist Nan Goldin, who extensively covered the HIV/AIDS crisis and opioid epidemic, as “two photographers of overwhelming importance”.

This is due to both artist’s “recognition that great art is often the product of struggle or vulnerability,” Forbes explains, nodding to the exhibition’s title.

‘Self Portrait’ by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1985 (V&A/Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation)

‘Jimmy Paulette and Taboo! In the Bathroom’ by Nan Goldin, 1991 (V&A/Nan Goldin)

But Fragile Beauty is not depressing. John always intended the exhibition to show “all sides of photography”. To display the serious and the “mischievous” in equal measure, Forbes says.

Case and point, Sam Taylor-Johnson’s 2004 shot of actor Laurence Fishburne crying hangs moments from Yasumasa Morimura’s doctored image of Nobel Prize winning physicist Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out.

‘Crying Men (Laurence Fishburne)’ by Sam Taylor-Johnson, 2022 (V&A/Sam Taylor-Johnson)

‘Malcolm X’ by Eve Arnold, 1962 (V&A/Eve Arnold Magnum Photos)

Marilyn Monroe is a central figure of the exhibition, with images taken by Elliott Erwitt (on set of the 1961 film The Misfits) and Bert Stern (taken just six weeks before she died in 1962) mounted on a wall of their own.

John has compared his own ability to “turn on” his exuberant Elton John persona to Monroe’s own carefully acted public image.

He had long been fascinated by Monroe’s glamour, but it was only by seeing Stern’s work did he realise how delicate and “beautiful” she was. In 1973, John recorded “Candle in the Wind” in tribute to Monroe.

‘Poppy’ by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1988 (V&A/Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation)

Around the time of his landmark solo concert an Evening with Elton John in 1999, he bought the entirety of Goldin’s multi image installation Thanksgiving, which covered the White Cube gallery in London from floor to ceiling because the painful images of “drugs, AIDS, [and] debauchery” so reminded him of his own life.

“I don’t think I’ve been moved by anything as much as when I saw that,” John, who has raised $565 million with his charity the Elton John AIDS Foundation, reveals in the exhibition’s accompanying book.

‘Clemens, Jens and Nicolas Laughing at Le Pulp, Paris’ by Nan Goldin, 1999 (V&A/Nan Goldin )

‘Untitled Film Still #17’ by Cindy Sherman, 1978 (V&A/Cindy Sherman/Hauser & Wirth Gallery )

Forbes describes Fragile Beauty as an intensely private collection taken into the public realm with an abundance of “personal meaning” still attached.

Romantically, when John and Furnish met at a mutual friend’s dinner party in 1993, they spent the night looking at Herb Ritts’s 1984 sensual Fred with Tires– an evening that Furnish says gave him courage to come out as gay to his family and friends in Canada.

John and Furnish became fathers when they welcomed their first child, Zachary via surrogacy in 2010. Three years later, their second son Elijah, was born via the same surrogate. John has since called parenthood the “greatest decision” he has ever made.

The couple chose to “celebrate” their sons with photography by commissioning British cameraless artist, Adam Fuss, to take portraits of the infants swimming in a giant steel basin of water over photographic paper, images they say capture the boy’s “individuality” as their silhouettes paddle, suspended in water, over a burnt orange background.

‘Zachary’ by Adam Fuss, 2011 (V&A/Adam Fuss/Fraenkel Gallery San Francisco)

‘Nan’s Bed’ by Alec Soth, 2018 (V&A/Alec Soth/Sean Kelly)

For John, collecting is not dissimilar to fatherhood. He tells Russell Tovey in an interview for the Fragile Beauty book “you have to take care for photography. It’s like having a child. You have to protect it and love it and look after it” from checking the provenance of an image to analysing its condition.

Photography has looked after John, too. When the world has been too overwhelming, he has found solace in the walls that surround him at home. “I can go out on the street, I can walk to a cafe, I can go to a gallery,” his husband tells Tovey. “Elton has had to create a world for himself where he feels at home.”

‘Untitled, 368, Fire Island Pines’ by Tom Bianchi, 1975-1983 (V&A/Tom Bianchi/Fahey Klein Gallery)

To his curators, John has likened the instinct to take a photograph to the magic in his music. “Like when you write a song, when you take a photograph, there’s a bit of luck and happenstance in it,” he said.

“Something happens at the right moment and you have to have the intelligence to click on it.”

Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Elton John and David Furnish Collection opens at the Victoria & Albert museum on 18 May