Fragile Beauty brings together the world’s most memorable photography

A devilish self-portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe, a snapshot from the club bathroom by Nan Goldin, a sun-drenched portrait from a road trip with Ryan McGinley, and a carefully-staged Cindy Sherman film still. All of these photos, representing a breadth of human experience, have something in common: they have been displayed across the walls of Sir Elton John and David Furnish, avid collectors of photography. Now, they’re also gracing the walls of London’s V&A museum, as part of its newly-opened exhibition, Fragile Beauty.

Featuring more than 300 rare prints and over 140 individual photographers from the pair’s collection, the exhibition spans some of the greatest bodies of work from the 20th and 21st centuries, with an emphasis on the simultaneous strength and vulnerability of their human subjects. Some highlights? A photo of Divine by Peter Hujar, one of Gillian Wearing’s uncanny masked portraits, Tyler Mitchell’s 2022 photo “Simply Fragile”, and iconic fashion images by Herb Ritts. Also featured is work by international photographers including Carrie Mae Weems, Diane Arbus, Ai Weiwei, Mickalene Thomas, Wang Qingsong and more.

Elton and David first gave the museum access to their homes – where photographs are displayed across the walls – a few years ago, explains V&A curator Lydia Caston. The themes and structure of the show emerged, she adds, as a result of “seeing how intensely they both live with photography”.

As suggested by the title, these themes include human vulnerability, in both a physical and emotional sense, as opened up by the creative act. Many creatives are featured in the collection themselves, as images in front of the lens, from Aretha Franklin to The Beatles, to Miles Davis and Marilyn Monroe. Other images turn away from celebrity to capture famed moments in time, including key moments from the Civil Rights Movement, 80s Aids activism, and the aftermath of 9/11, highlighting the importance of photography not just as an art form, but as a vehicle for reportage.

Take a look at some of the images from Fragile Beauty in the gallery above, and read more about the curation, themes, and highlights of the show below.

Could you tell us a bit about the title, Fragile Beauty? What kind of themes or common threads does that draw from?

Lydia Caston: The collection is unique in its breadth and tone. It is at once playful and surprising, and – as Elton has often reminded us – mischievous in spirit. But it is also contemplative and thoughtful, with many of the photographs evoking a sense of human vulnerability. It combines the cruel and tender, the fragility of Robert Mapplethorpe’s flower still-lifes with the beauty of Frances McLaughlin-Gill’s fashion pictures. 

Fragile Beauty  is also the name of one of the sections at the heart of the exhibition. Both Elton and David felt strongly that this should be the title of the entire show, as it captures so many of the ideas explored in the 300 works we are exhibiting. 

Why was it important to bring this collection into the public eye?

Lydia Caston: Elton and David’s collection allows us to bring out new intriguing narratives in photography that we may not have showcased with our own collections to our audiences before. One question – that we are leaving up to the visitors to answer – is what the exhibition reveals about the collectors themselves.

How involved were Elton and David in the curation of the exhibition?

Lydia Caston: It’s been an exciting and truly memorable experience working alongside Elton, David, and their teams. They have been incredibly generous in opening their homes to us and sharing their photography collection with the museum and its visitors. We are grateful to them for this and their engaged participation and creative drive throughout the collaboration. They actively continue to collect, so it’s been fascinating to see the collection evolve as we prepared the exhibition too.

The collection responds to historic moments and movements as much as it celebrates celebrity portraiture. How do these two parts sit alongside each other in the exhibition?

Lydia Caston: Our key challenge as curators has been to translate an extensive and exuberant private collection into a display for the public. We were helped by being able to experience the collection in situ [to gain] a feeling of how Elton and David encounter and live with the collection every day. Each chapter in the show has its own room with a different design and atmosphere. Visitors will move through a new theme, from ‘Stars of the Stage, Screen and Studio’, to ‘Desire’, to reportage, all the way to abstract photography.

There’s an obvious appeal for Elton John fans – how do his interests and aesthetic sensibilities shine through in the collection?

Lydia Caston: The exhibition is both a celebration of their collecting and a serious engagement with the individual objects on display. We open with fashion, and the photographs that first caught Elton’s attention and launched his photography collection. In this section, visitors see images that often reflect the contemporary culture of their time and chart transitions from the glamour and femininity of the post-war period to the radical diversity of contemporary streetwear.

In another section, we see portraits of figures who have inspired both Elton and David, including Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Chet Baker and Divine. The collectors have an incredible knowledge of photography history and it’s been wonderful to discover artists through their eyes too. Ralph Eugene Meatyard has been a particular favourite for me. He was an optician in Lexington, Kentucky but also a photographer who took surreal and abstract pictures of his family in the style of the ‘Southern Gothic’.

What do you hope that visitors who aren’t fans of the musician – or familiar with his work – can take from the show?

Lydia Caston: Whether [visitors] are fans of Elton’s music or photography afficionados, the diversity of the collection has allowed us to select a range of works for display, and we hope there is something for everyone. Each section journeys across the recent history of photography, with some known photographs and some perhaps entirely new to our visitors.

Fragile Beauty runs at the Victoria and Albert Museum until January 5, 2025.