It would be easy call this exhibition a greatest hits collection, but really, it’s so much more than that.
“Would anyone expect Sir Elton John and David Furnish’s photo collection to be anything less than a reflection of themselves and what the public knows about them: creative, cheeky, thrilling, dramatic, stylish, sexual and political? On their first date, a Herb Ritts monograph book became a conversation connecting the two of them together. “I had the coffee table book of his photographs. Elton actually had some of the photographs,” said Furnish in a video about their shared love of photography.
At the Victoria and Albert Museum in London from now until January 5, 2025, over 300 prints from roughly 140 photographers are featured in “Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection.” For the uninitiated, John and Furnish have been amassing a mammoth photo archive for thirty years now: their entire library consists of approximately 7,000 prints.
In terms of sheer size, “Fragile Beauty” is the largest temporary exhibition of photos ever mounted at the V&A. The images date back from the 1950s to the present, and it’s a veritable who’s who of photographers: Irving Penn, Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, Cindy Sherman, Ai Weiwei, Diane Arbus, Gordon Parks, Nan Goldin, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Ryan Mcginley and Tyler Mitchell, to name a few. The photos are presented according to different themes such as fashion, desire (featuring the male figure), stars of stage, screen and studio and reportage.
“There will be some familiar, surprising, emotional and humorous photographs throughout the show as the exhibition sections reflect and embrace the rich and diverse nature of the collection,” curator Lydia Caston told Observer.
If visitors look closely, a few playful “cameo” prints of John appear in some of the thematic categories. Mario Testino lensed his hands—complete with blinged-out rings on a few fingers—against a deep red brocade backdrop of his jacket. But naturally, the show opens with fashion photography—the largest group of all their images—which John started collecting in the early 1990s during a trip to the South of France. At a friend’s chateau, John acquired prints from Herb Ritts, Irving Penn and Horst P. Horst.
Richard Avedon’s Ronald Fischer, Beekeeper, Davis, California sets the tone for the exhibition, hanging right at the entrance to the first gallery. A little background on this particular Avedon portrait: he put out a call for a model to be shot with bees and Fischer traveled from Illinois to Davis, California to heed Avedon’s directions in front of the camera: “Don’t smile, don’t move.”
Caston told us that, “three sittings and four stings later, the result captures a tense moment within the constraints of formal portraiture. This extraordinary work is the latest addition to the collection, acquired only four weeks before the exhibition opened. It came directly to the V&A for display and has not even been to Elton and David’s home yet.”
Another highlight of “Fragile Beauty” includes Nan Goldin’s Thanksgiving, a monumental, floor-to-ceiling installation chronicling the lives of Goldin and her friends from 1973 to 1999—with the photographs serving as the walls. In this visual ode to her close-knit group, Goldin documented a trajectory of their highs and lows in various compositions.
In a personal reflections video on the collection, Elton John opened up about seeing Thanksgiving for the first time: “It brought me back to an era of my life. Photographs about AIDS, photographs about addiction, photographs about abuse. Up until that point, it was the most powerful thing I’d ever seen in a gallery. How can you buy one photograph from this exhibition? This should be seen in its entirety.”
John and Furnish clearly appreciate diverse aspects of photography and visual storytelling including historical documentation: running the gamut from their passion for celebrity (Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Divine, Doris Day, Aretha Franklin, the Beatles and even Miss Piggy), from the Mapplethorpes dedicated to male silhouettes to sobering figures like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Che Guevara. Some photographers on display here captured heated social movements like the iconic Jonathan Bachman print of Black Lives Matter protester Ieshia Evans standing in her dress while two police officers confront her. The Arab Spring and gender identity are also represented in photographer Lalla Essaydi’s Bullets Revisited #20, which captures a woman from the back in a beautiful, sequined cape against a wall and floor made of bullet cases.
Furnish said, “That is one of the many things we love about photography: the ability to chronicle a time—a moment in time—and capture it and preserve it so that it’s around forever and we never forget it.” Indeed, many of these images have already been seared into our collective memories. Harking back to John’s legendary music career, the easy comparison would be to call it a greatest hits collection. But really, it’s much more than that.
