Elton John’s path to stardom and the highs and lows of his fame, addiction and recovery are well-known. But most people don’t know about the journey he has taken over the last 30 years to become one of the world’s most pre-eminent collectors of photography. Some works from Elton and his husband David Furnish’s bountiful collection will soon be exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in partnership with Gucci, and here, they’ve exclusively told 10 about some of the show’s highlights.

After quitting drugs and alcohol in the early ’90s, Elton started collecting photographs. “I’d just gotten sober back then,” he said in 2016. “It was like I was seeing with clear eyes. I was in a château in the south of France and David Fahey, who owns a gallery in LA, showed me some prints by Herb Ritts, Horst [P. Horst] and Irving Penn and that was it.”

Since then, his and Furnish’s collection has swollen to include more than 7,000 photographs, marking it as one of the most important privately owned groups of images in the world. Scattered across their homes, “they actively live with [the collection],” says Duncan Forbes, director of photography at the V&A. “Elton loves his salon hangs. The joke is that you can never see the wallpaper in any of these houses. You go into their properties and they are absolutely crammed with photographs! I actually stood in Elton’s shower room in Los Angeles and selected images off the wall, which was a strange experience.”

“There was a gallery in Atlanta headed by Jane Jackson and she very much became his teacher,” Furnish said earlier this year. “He voraciously became a student of photography and really educated himself about its history.”

“I first had a 2,500-square-feet apartment,” says Elton. “But the more I collected photography and ran out of space, I had to buy the ones next door.” His Atlanta condo (where he and David lived intermittently for more than three decades) ultimately ended up being six separate, adjacent apartments, all connected.

To give an idea of the collection’s sensibility, much of the contents from Elton’s Atlanta apartment were auctioned at Christie’s in New York in February following its sale. Titled Goodbye Peachtree Road, the landmark sale followed celebrity auctions by Freddie Mercury, André Leon Talley, George Michael and David Bowie. By giving collectors and fans the chance to own something Elton-approved, it’s no wonder that the auction was a huge success, raising £16 million.

An abundance of lots were available with truly something for everyone – if maximalist design, nude prints, designer clothing and celebrity portraits are your thing. Some key themes: vintage photographs (George Platt Lynes, Imogen Cunningham, Brassaï), male nudes (Bruce Weber, Jack Pierson, Andy Warhol), celebrity portraits (Lord Snowdon, David Bailey), religion- inspired jewellery (Cartier, Chopard, Yohji Yamamoto), fashion imagery (Steven Meisel, Herb Ritts, Horst P. Horst, David Bailey, William Klein) and contemporary British art (Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Derek Jarman, Damien Hirst).

A whole auction was solely dedicated to his collection of Versace clothing and homewares, born from Elton’s close relationship with the late Gianni Versace. Notable highlights include rare day-glo paintings by artist and Aids activist Keith Haring, Louis XIV-style fancy dress costumes worn at Elton’s famed 50th birthday party, Ryan McGinley’s X-rated image of a snake coiling around a penis and a rare purple neon sculpture by David LaChapelle which reads ‘HORNY?!’.

Common practice with such sales is for the auction house to advertise deceivingly low estimates to entice bidders into thinking they might get a bargain (the LaChapelle was estimated at just under £800; it brought in £26,650) – most items achieved significantly higher hammer prices in the end.

Photography from their collection had already been displayed in The Radical Eye, a major exhibition at Tate Modern which ran from November 2016 to May 2017. The show focused on works by early modernist photography pioneers – ranging from Bauhaus abstraction and surrealism to early queer portraits and 1930s social documentary – including Edward Steichen, László Moholy-Nagy, Brassaï, Dorothea Lange, André Kertész and Man Ray.

It was critically acclaimed, with the Times saying, “He’s definitely got one. An eye, that is. Radical or not, it’s bloody good. This exhibition provides a perfect beginner’s primer in the themes, core values and great practitioners of modernist photography.” Audiences flocked to the Tate’s shows that year: a million more visitors visited in 2016 compared to 2015. But how is this upcoming exhibition different?

“We just decided to pick up where the Tate show left off,” says Forbes. “We cover photographs from the 1950s until the present. The show is much broader and more contemporary. We’re even including things that Elton and David have purchased in the last couple of years.”

The couple are generous patrons of the V&A. In 2014, they loaned works by fashion photographer Horst P. Horst to the gallery. Then, in 2019, financial donations led to the institution’s new photography centre being named in their honour. Fragile Beauty was born from a mutual conversation between them, the museum curators and Newell Harbin, director of their collection. “We sat down at Elton’s kitchen table in Atlanta and began to put the show together,” says Forbes.

Themes include fashion, where their collecting began, extending from Elton’s interest in style through his own musical performances in the ’70s and ’80s. On view will be images by photographers ranging from Irving Penn, Frances McLaughlin-Gill (Vogue’s first female fashion photographer), Richard Avedon and Guy Bourdin to Helmut Newton, Nontsikelelo Veleko, Tina Barney and Harley Weir.

“The show moves on to the stars [of] stage, screen and studio,” continues Forbes. “Perhaps [because of] reflecting their own lives in starlight, John and Furnish are interested in images of musicians and Hollywood actors. It’s a really fun, fabulous collection of photographs.”

Other sections like ‘Desire’ indicate the couple’s passion for images of the male form, bringing homoerotic and queer photography; another on reportage is grounded in the civil rights era, with the 1960s being a formative period in Elton’s life, and continues with present-day news images. “Both Elton and David are very passionate about photojournalism,” says Forbes. “Elton sits there on his iPad and picks out contemporary press photographs that he feels are important and significant, then asks his curator to hunt them down… which can be difficult as there’s no culture of printmaking among many contemporary photojournalists.”

‘Fragile Beauty’ (the section from which the show takes its title) includes works by the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin. It looks at people who were part of the bohemian culture in New York in the ’70s and ’80s and includes figures like Peter Hujar, who were connected with places like Warhol’s studio The Factory. Remarking on Hujar – soon to be portrayed by Ben Whishaw in a biopic directed by indie filmmaker Ira Sachs – Elton once said, “his humanity, depth and sensual insights aren’t for everyone, and don’t need to be, but once his pictures get into your bloodstream they are impossible to shake”. With many similar works on view to the public for the first time, it wouldn’t be a surprise if this show causes a new generation to feel the same way.

Forbes describes how Elton is particularly passionate about Nan Goldin’s installation Thanksgiving. “Although it’s one artwork, it comprises 149 different prints. We’re going to build a room in the show to display them,” he tells us. “It’s a narrative of nightlife from the 1970s to the 1990s. It’s incredibly moving because a lot of the people in those images are now deceased [many of Goldin’s subjects died during the Aids pandemic]. I think that for Goldin the work functions as an act of love towards the people she photographed.”

Other sections include ‘Constructed Images’, which looks at big bold photography from the 1980s, when printmaking got bigger and more colourful, echoing the growth of the advertising and music industries. Jazz images by William Claxton and Herman Leonard are also on view; Forbes mentions how Elton is “obsessed with Chet Baker” – a whole series of images of the American jazz singer and trumpeter will be displayed.

Acknowledging that it is “predominantly a show of classics”, Forbes mentions that contemporary names like Tyler Mitchell are of great importance to Elton. Mitchell famously captured Beyoncé in a white Gucci wedding dress, topped by a maximalist floral headdress by Phil John Perry, for Vogue. Since then he has made his name as an artist, with shows at Gagosian while also shooting campaigns for Ferragamo and JW Anderson. His powerfully tender image of a beetle resting on the face of a young boy (see previous spread) will be shown.

Another photographer straddling fashion and art, Ryan McGinley, whose works capture the freedom and hedonism of youth, is included. The show also presents lesser-known names like Vietnamese artist An-My Lê, whose work reckons with war and violent combat, and Trevor Paglen, whose practice tackles digital secrecy and mass surveillance.

On what viewers can expect, Forbes says, “it’s mischievous, quite playful. There’s a lot of very hard-hitting, quite serious photography, but we’ve tried to retain a playful tone. It’s playful yet serious, which reflects Elton’s character.” I ask if the show might encourage audiences to start playing with building their own collections and Forbes agrees – photography can be the most accessible way to start buying art. This might sound difficult when you don’t have a pop star’s budget but Elton advises wannabe collectors to not to seek only objects that are expensive or fashionable.

“I hate trophy art,” he told Jane Jackson, art dealer and previous director of his collection. “I buy what I like and if it’s not fashionable I don’t care. The more you collect, the more sophisticated your eye becomes. I’d rather walk into a house that’s full of mediocre stuff, but the owners love it and they’ve bought it themselves, than see trophy art on the wall.

Tyler Mitchell, Simply Fragile, 2022

Elton John: Oh, the boy with the beetle on his nose! Newell [Harbin, director of their collection] sent me seven or eight photographs by Tyler and I just went straight to that one because it’s such a fabulous photograph and it’s funny. Since we bought Tyler’s photo, I see his name everywhere. [In 2018, aged only 23, he became the first Black photographer to shoot the US Vogue cover.] Black photographers are leading the way at the moment and it’s so wonderful to see it.

David Furnish: Tyler’s from Atlanta, where [our] photography bug first landed. The collection is an evolving and moving thing. It’s wonderful to see the connections between photographers: the fact that Tyler Mitchell was so strongly influenced by Ryan McGinley and Larry Clark, who will be in the exhibition. It’s the same with Elton, there are always people from the past who influence you and you’re always looking at the new for further inspiration. It very much is the now. It really does look forward.

Ryan McGinley, Dakota Hair, 2004

EJ: [Ryan] became a friend and took the photo for The Captain & the Kid album cover [in 2006]. I love his photograph Dakota Hair from 2004. He just used to drive across the country with a bunch of people, taking photographs.

DF: To me, that’s something quintessentially American: the vast expanse of the country and the fact that people do these massive road trips across miles of countryside and desert. I think this is just a beautiful romanticisation. In Dakota, the girl is in the back of a pickup truck and it just evokes the spirit of Americana. It looks like an outtake from Thelma & Louise.

Lee Friedlander, Florida, 1963

Lydia Caston, Exhibition Project Curator, V&A: One of Friedlander’s most celebrated series The Little Screens features minor celebrities appearing on glowing televisions in anonymous motel rooms. The pictures were described at the time by photographer Walker Evans as “deft, witty, spanking little poems of hate”.

Zanele Muholi, Labo I, Torino, Italy, 2019

LC: Some of the latest additions to the collection speak to current issues but also reveal continuity with the Elton and David’s earlier collecting passions. Zanele Muholi stages self- portraits to emphasise Black queer visibility. Using found objects and everyday materials as props, they draw on conventions of classical painting and familiar tropes of ethnographic imagery. Here, Muholi has fashioned a blanket to resemble a headdress, a powerful image that lends strength and beauty to those fighting discrimination.

Peter Hujar, Divine at the Metropolitan Museum Russian Opening (III), 1976

DF: “Hujar was in the vanguard. Another great artist that we lost to Aids. My entry point to Hujar was Mapplethorpe. Their works are so evocative of the time and [capture] a moment in the whole New York art scene where an entire community was just wiped out.”

EJ: When I curated the show at the Fraenkel Gallery [in San Francisco in 2022], Newell came down with the photographs and we put them in order. There was an astonishing variety: a wonderful photo of Peggy Lee, Candy Darling on her Deathbed… He was a gay photographer who pushed barriers. You go back to people like George Platt Lynes and think, ”God, they pushed things so much”. And Herbert List also pushed barriers at a time when it was not fashionable to do so.

Tom Bianchi, Untitled, 368, Fire Island Pines, 1975-83

LC: Tom Bianchi spent many summers at Fire Island Pines [in NYC]. He captured its halcyon days with pictures of tanned torsos and beachgoers playfully posing. His photos remained hidden for 30 years, recognising a time when homosexuality was still illegal across the US. For him, the Pines was where “dreams of being an out gay man and artist became possible”.

Nan Goldin, Clemens, Jens and Nicolas Laughing at Le Pulp. Paris. 1999

EJ: I saw this four-wall installation which took my breath away. I’d never seen anything quite like it. It really took me aback because, having walked around and seen most of the photographs, which took me quite a long time, it brought me back to an era of my life, of photographs about Aids, about addiction, about abuse. Everything on those four walls spoke to me. It was like looking at my life as well as hers.

DF: The images spoke to us so personally because of the work that we do with the Elton John Aids Foundation and how deeply touched we both are by the cause. You know, both Elton and I lived through the [pandemic], which was a very scary, very desperate time for anybody living with Aids. It wiped out an entire generation of artists. Aids was so brutal within that and many other communities and to see Nan as a survivor and documenting that so personally was incredibly powerful for us.

Alec Soth, Nan’s Bed, Brooklyn, New York, 2018

LC: Alec Soth’s picture of Nan Goldin’s bed is also an homage to three other artists. The two portraits above the bed are by Peter Hujar, one of Elton and David’s favourite photographers. They show Greer Lankton, a transgender artist known for her eerie sewn dolls, and David Wojnarowicz, an artist, filmmaker and Aids activist. Hujar, Lankton and Wojnarowicz were all friends of Goldin’s and part of the 1980s East Village art scene.

Eve Arnold, Malcolm X, Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1962

DF: I love reportage photography for its ability to capture a moment in time and a moment in history.

EJ: When you see an image in war or a demonstration that strikes you as being an important political image, it’s really essential to have it.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Self Portrait, 1985

DF: Robert was one of the greatest portrait artists of all time and a great beauty himself. I remember Ingrid Sischy telling us about her days going around New York with Robert and saying, “You would walk into a room and literally the conversation would stop.” He was so strikingly beautiful. The self-portraits of him, they capture that beauty and spirit.

EJ: I was supposed to have my photograph taken [by him]. I had a date in the diary, but he died two weeks before it [in 1989] and everyone knew he was really ill. There’s something about his self-portraits, [like this] one with the devil horns. Robert was an incredibly wonderful self-portraitist. He gets it. He’s like “look at me, I’m a little devil”. He was a little devil.

‘Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection’, in partnership with Gucci, opens Saturday 18 May, V&A, South Kensington, vam.ac.uk. Taken from Issue 23 of 10 Men Australia – PRECISION, CRAFT, LUXURY – out NOW.

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