FRAGILE BEAUTY

The private collection of Sir Elton John and David Furnish, the result of thirty years of passionate collecting, represents one of the most impressive private photography collections on a global level. Elton John – a film enthusiast and avid reader, particularly fascinated by images of artists Salvador Dalí and David Hockney, composer Igor Stravinsky, and writer Truman Capote – fell in love with photography in the early 1990s. In 1993, he purchased a 1932 image by Man Ray, Glass Tears, for $193,895, then the highest price ever paid for a single photograph at auction. The public became aware of John’s impressive photography collection, which charts the rise of the medium from 1910 onwards, through the exhibitions Chorus of Light at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in 2000 and The Radical Eye at Tate Modern in London in 2016. One of the main lots in the collection is Dovima with Elephants by Richard Avedon, 1955, a variant of what is perhaps his most famous photograph of all time: among the boundless spaces of Ryan McGinley, the conceptual self-portraits of Cindy Sherman, and the lives of others by Diane Arbus, stand out names like William Eggleston, Sally Mann, and Zanele Muholi. But also the forgotten objects of Irving Penn, the uncensored bodies of Robert Mapplethorpe, and the China of Ai Weiwei alongside Tyler Mitchell, Trevor Paglen, and Horst P. Horst. Since 1993, Elton John and David Furnish have diligently preserved more than 7,000 photographic works by 140 authors, 300 of which will be exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in the spring, following the success of The Radical Eye.