Elton John, David Furnish’s Photo Collection to Be Exhibited

AP

11:51 JST, November 2, 2023

LONDON (AP) — Photos of iconic celebrities and historic moments from the collection of Elton John and David Furnish will go on display at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum next year.

The museum said Tuesday that the exhibition, titled “Fragile Beauty,” will include 300 images by more than 140 photographers, including Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, William Eggleston, Zanele Muholi and Ai Weiwei.

The images, many of which have never been on public display, will be on show from May 18, 2024, until Jan. 5, 2025.

The exhibition will include portraits of stars including Marilyn Monroe, Miles Davis and Chet Baker, and photojournalism from historic moments including the Black civil rights movement of the 1960s, 1980s AIDS activism and the Sept. 11 attack.

The works cover the period from the 1950s to the present. The exhibition follows a show of earlier, black-and-white photographs from the collection held at London’s Tate Modern in 2016.

John began collecting photographs after getting sober in the 1990s, and he and his husband Furnish now have one of the largest photo collections in private hands.

Duncan Forbes, the V&A museum’s head of photography, said the images in the collection ranged “from the playful and surprising to the contemplative and thoughtful.”

“‘Fragile Beauty’ will be a truly epic journey across the recent history of photography, and a celebration of Sir Elton John and David Furnish’s passion for the medium,” he said.

The V&A has a collection of more than 800,000 photographs dating back to the birth of the medium. John and Furnish made a major donation to the museum’s photography center in 2019.