Introduction

Sir Elton John began collecting photographs in 1991 and his collection is now regarded as one of the leading private photography collections in the world, distinguished by its exceptional quality and remarkable range and depth. It contains over 7,000 fine art photographs and its full formal title is The Sir Elton John and David Furnish Photography Collection.

This exhibition showcases a selection from the collection of over 300 rare prints from 140 photographers. As such, it is the Victoria and Albert Museum’s largest ever photography exhibition.

This exhibition complements the 2016 exhibition, The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection staged at Tate Modern. Roughly speaking that exhibition covered the pre-war, Modernist aspects of their huge collection, whereas this exhibition covers the period from 1950 to the present day.

The show includes an impressive roster of leading photographers to tell the story of postwar and contemporary photography, and includes celebrated works by Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, William Eggleston, Diane Arbus, Sally Mann, Zanele Muholi, Ai Weiwei, Carrie Mae Weems and many, many others.

Exhibition structure

The exhibition is arranged in the following themes. I’m cutting and pasting the curators’ wall labels (and highlighting them in italics) to give you a good feel for the show and the themes it covers. Then I list some of the most striking images, ones which have stayed with me for the few days since I visited, but only some – there were plenty more in each section.

At the end of this review is a gallery showing all the images we’re allowed to show to promote the exhibition.

1. Fashion

This section charts the evolution of fashion photography from the glamour of post-war Parisian couture to the globalism of contemporary clothing. During the 1950s, a fresh dynamism took over the magazines. Studio backdrops were swapped for city skylines, as in the work of Frances McLaughlin-Gill or Frank Horvat. Following the Swinging Sixties, revolutionary designers stepped onto the scene with daring looks prompting more provocative fashion imagery. Today’s photographers document the ever-changing culture of streetwear, celebrating self-made garments and individual expression.

I’m not very sympathetic to fashion but this small room contained some absolutely iconic images.

• Richard Avedon – Dovima with Elephants, 1955
• Helmut Newton – Elsa Peretti as Bunny, New York (on terrace of her apartment, costume by Halston), 1975
• Richard Avedon’s shot of Nastassja Kinski draped with a huge snake, 1981
• Herb Ritts – Versace Dress, 1990
• Tina Barney – The Limo, 2006

Versace Dress (Back View), El Mirage, 1990 by Herb Ritts © Herb Ritts Foundation. Courtesy of Fahey Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

2. Stars of Stage, Screen and Studio

From giants of the silver screen to celebrated musicians and artists, iconic figures have long intrigued Elton John and David Furnish. Passionate about cinema, they have acquired images of actors such as Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor whose glamour and showmanship epitomised Hollywood’s Golden Age. Frank Sinatra and Doris Day, who both succeeded in musical and movie careers, are pictured here at the height of their fame.

Portraits of rock, folk, jazz and blues performers, on stage and behind the scenes, honour the artistry
of musicians who revolutionised their industry. They include the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, and the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Elvis Presley. John is particularly fascinated by those who suffered for their art and the collection contains multiple images of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker and Hollywood star Marilyn Monroe. In other pictures, we see portraits of painters and photographers whose life and work continue to inspire John and Furnish today.

• Bob Willoughby – Billie Holiday, Singing at the Tiffany Club, Los Angeles, 1951
• John Florea – Doris Day, 1952
• Sid Avery:
  • James Dean, Close-Up with a Bolex Camera on the Set of Giant, 1955
  • Elizabeth Taylor Sunning Herself on the Set of Giant, Marfa, Texas, 1955
  • Marlon Brando with Bongo Drums in the Den of his Beverly Hills Home, 1955
• Lew Allen – Elvis Presley Kiss, Cleveland Arena Concert, 23 November 1956
• William Claxton:
  • Dinah Washington, Los Angeles, 1959
  • Mahalia Jackson, Chicago, 1960
  • Ray Charles with a Raelette, Hollywood, 1959
  • Duke Ellington, Hollywood, 1959
• Herman Leonard – Chet Baker, New York City, 1956

Chet Baker, New York City, 1956 by Herman Leonard © Herman Leonard Photography, LLC

• Richard Avedon – Bob Dylan, 132nd Street and FDR Drive, Harlem, New York City, 4 November 1963
• Robert Freeman – The Beatles’ Boots, 1964
• Richard Avedon – the Beatles, 1967
• Lee Friedlander – Aretha Franklin, 1968
• Terry O’Neill – Frank Sinatra in Miami Beach, 1968
• Norman Seeff – Joni Mitchell, Los Angeles, 1976
• Michael Halsband – Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat #143, New York City, 10 July 1985
• Irving Penn – The Hand of Miles Davis, 1986

To be honest, the exhibition could have stopped here because this blitz of famous musicians, movie stars and artists triggered a flood of memories of music and films and emotions. Impossible not to love the iconic images of, say, Mitchell and Monroe, the iconic shot of a very young Dylan etc. The boxing photo of Warhol and Basquiat is fabulous. But my standout piece in the room was Irving Penn’s three shots of Miles Davis’s hand. Four fingers which produced 40 years of unbelievably varied and powerful music.

3. Desire

Fabulous photos of gorgeous hunky beautiful young men in various states of dress and undress, so young and full of life and male beauty. So nice to see the male willy shot candidly and overtly, as just another part of the human body, sometimes a detail of a larger portrait, sometimes singled out for close-up scrutiny as by Mapplethorpe.

The photographs in this section reveal a desire for the male form, from subtle studio portraiture of the
1950s to more explicit exposure in contemporary works. As a celebration of the collection’s numerous
homoerotic pictures, once viewed as provocative or even scandalous, they elevate to the public realm
what previously remained hidden. Some photographers take an autobiographical approach to documenting their communities.

For artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar, who came to prominence in the early years of the gay rights movement, their intention was to shatter oppressive stereotypes and revel in their queerness. From the mid-1980s, the AIDS epidemic fuelled an urgency to visualise a community that had long been forced into the shadows. The statuesque male body in the pictures of Herb Ritts and Pierre et Gilles became a camp counterpoint to the relentless hostility of mainstream media.

• Herbert List – Young men under Reed Roof, Torremolinos, Andalucía, Spain, 1951
• Tamotsu Yatō – From the series Young Samurai: Bodybuilders of Japan, mid-1960s
• Sunil Gupta – Untitled #21, from the series Christopher Street, 1976
• Robert Mapplethorpe:
  • Patrice, 1977
  • Jack Walls, 1982
• Tom Bianchi: his Fire island series [a series of photographs celebrating gay joy at a time when homosexuality was under attack in Reagan’s America]:
  • Untitled, 368, Fire Island Pines, 1975–83
  • Untitled, 780, Fire Island Pines, 1975–83

Untitled, 368, Fire Island Pines, 1975 to 1983 by Tom Bianchi © Tom Bianchi, courtesy of Fahey Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

• Andy Warhol:
  • Self-Portrait, 1980
  • Self-Portrait in Drag, 1981
• Herb Ritts – Fred with Tires, Hollywood, 1984
• Gilbert & George – Naked Body, 1991
• Pierre et Gilles – Life Saver, Shane, Sydney, 1995

4. Reportage

Elton John and David Furnish have a passion for photojournalism, actively searching out many famous examples of the genre. This selection begins with photographs from the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, a formative period for John. The images depict a heroic battle against discrimination as American youth mobilised to end racial segregation in the South. The freedom struggle took many forms and, against the background of the US bombing of Vietnam, it became more militant as the decade wore on. This was also an era of political assassinations, as seen in the portraits of leaders whose time was cut violently short.

Two other areas of reportage have a deep personal and public resonance for John and Furnish: the AIDS activism of the late 1980s and the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. The couple continue to collect photojournalism today, drawing connections between past and present.

America again. And the 1960s again.

Black Americans. New York City. 1962 by Bruce Davidson © Bruce Davidson Magnum Photos

It’s the decade curators and pop culture fans are drawn back to again and again and again like a dog to its sick. Martin Luther King, Civil Rights, the Freedom March, Malcolm X, Black Power, Vietnam protests, JFK, Bobby Kennedy being assassinated – all your old favourites are here. We’re only lacking Woodstock, Altamont and Jim Morrison poncing around on stage and we’d have the complete I-Spy Book of 60s clichés. Nothing from anywhere else in the world. The 1960s only happened in America.

Malcolm X, Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1962 by Eve Arnold © Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos

As did the Reagan 1980s and AIDS activism, the first Gulf War, 9/11, blah blah blah. America America America. There is a little flurry of abroad in the next section, with one photo from the endless civil war in Syria, another from the current conflict in Ukraine, and the bizarre assassination of the Russiabn ambassador to Turkey. But these rare exceptions only foreground the rule that this is a exhibition of (almost entirely) images from America.

• Garry Winogrand – John F. Kennedy, Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles, 1960
• Eve Arnold – Malcolm X, Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1962
• René Burri – Che Guevara, Havana, Cuba, 1963
• Danny Lyon:
  • Segregated Drinking Fountains in the County Courthouse, Albany, Georgia, USA, August 1963
  • Demonstration at an ‘All-white’ Swimming Pool, Cairo, Illinois, USA, 1962
• Stephen Somerstein – Coretta Scott King and Husband Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on Platform in front of Alabama State House, Smiling at the Crowd of 25,000 Marchers at Conclusion of 1965 Selma to Montgomery, Alabama Civil Rights March, 25 March 1965
• John Dominis – American Track and Field Athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos, First and Third Place Winners in the 200 Meter Race, Protest with the Black Power Salute, Mexico City, 1968
• Boris Yaro – The Shooting of Robert F. Kennedy, Los Angeles, 1968
• John Filo – The Grieving Student at Kent State University, 4 May 1970
• Pirkle Jones:
  • Black Panther demonstration in front of the Alameda County Court House, Oakland, California, during Huey Newton’s trial, 30 July 1968
  • Black Panthers from Sacramento, Free Huey Rally, Bobby Hutton Memorial Park, Oakland, CA, 25 August 1968

The caption to the Black Panther photos made me smile. The curators write:

The Panthers consciously projected a militant ethos and relied on supportive photographers and filmmakers to promote this image. The strategy proved highly successful, terrifying mainstream America and resulting in extensive harassment and criminalisation of the Party by the FBI.

You can feel their righteous identification with these fearless activists for Black rights. And then you turn the corner and are confronted by a wall of photos of 9/11 and instantly reflect, ‘Well, I can think of another organisation which “projected a militant ethos” and “relied on supportive photographers and filmmakers” (and social media experts) for its impact, which “terrified mainstream America and resulted in criminalisation by the FBI” – al-Qaeda. Black Panthers – the right kind of terrifying mainstream America; al-Qaeda, not so much.

Let me be absolutely clear that I am in no way mocking what happened on 9/11, I am as appalled as anyone at what happened, and am awed by the bravery of the New York emergency services. I am  gently mocking art gallery curators who, here as everywhere, like to flirt with radical chic and sympathise with ‘revolutionary’ movements, as long as are from long ago and no longer present the slightest threat to the current state of bourgeois society, one of whose typical embodiments is…the art gallery.

There are half a dozen or so heart-wrenching photos of 9/11 which really bring home the dazed horror of the day.

• Richard Drew – The Falling Man, 11 September 2001
• Jeff Mermelstein from the series Ground Zero, 11 September 2001
  • Fireman with Tears, 2001
  • Statue, 2001
  • Tree and Skeleton of Tower Two, 2001
  • Red Cube, 2001
• Ryan McGinley – Sam (Ground Zero), 11 September 2001

5. The American Scene

I laughed out loud when, after being dazzled by American music, movie and art stars, then bombarded with a comprehensive recap of the 1960s in America, you walk round the corner into the next section  to discover that it is all about…America!

American photography resonates strongly in the collection, including images by many of the most influential artists of the post-war period. Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, William Eggleston and Lewis Baltz feature prominently, all iconoclasts who broke with established practice to produce a less than idealised vision of the country. Subjects range from the anonymity of the urban environment to historically charged landscapes in the rural South. The road trip, the haphazard expansion of the American West, and the extraordinary glimpsed within the everyday are potent recurring themes.

Having lived in Atlanta for three decades, Elton John has collected many important works from the American South, including photographs by Henry Clay Anderson, Alec Soth and Sally Mann. Uncomfortable histories are not ignored. The USA is pictured unsparingly through the camera lens.

• Roy DeCarava – Catsup bottles, table and coat, 1952
• Saul Leiter:
  • Canopy, 1958
  • Snow, 1970
• Lee Friedlander:
  • Newark, New Jersey, 1962
  • Florida, 1963
  • New Orleans, 1968
• William Eggleston:
  • Near Minter City and Glendora, Mississippi, about 1972
  • Greenwood, Mississippi, about 1973
  • Memphis, Tennessee, 1971
  • Untitled (Coca-Cola and Peaches! Sign), 1973
  • Sumner, Mississippi, Cassidy Bayou in Background, 1971
• Stephen Shore, from Uncommon Places:
  • Holden Street, North Adams, Massachusetts, 13 July 1974
  • Graig Nettles, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 1 March 1978
  • US 10, Post Falls, Idaho, 25 August 1974
  • El Paso Street, El Paso, Texas, 5 July 1975
• Alec Soth – The Farm, Angola State Prison, Angola, LA, 2002

The Farm, Angola State Prison, Angola, LA 2002 by Alec Soth © Alec Soth and Weinstein Hammons Gallery

There is a small sequence devoted to the great Diane Arbus, great, excellent, if rather predictable but, yet again, here we are, back in the 1960s, in New York. Where we were in the previous section. And the section before that. And the section before that.

• Identical twins, Roselle, N.J. 1966
• Transvestite couple at a dance, N.Y.C. 1961
• Exasperated boy with a toy hand grenade, N.Y.C. 1963

6. Fragile Beauty

Two photographers are of immense significance to Elton John and David Furnish: Nan Goldin and Robert Mapplethorpe. Both escaped the strictures of their suburban upbringing for the bohemian subcultures of New York City during the 1970s. For both Goldin and Mapplethorpe, photography was intensely personal, a way to keep things real. They strove to create an intimate portrait of their generation, representing the lives of alternative and queer-identified communities that had long been stigmatised by mainstream America. Other images speak to human vulnerability and the creativity of transgression. Mary Ellen Mark, Larry Clark and Ryan McGinley are drawn to young people on the fringes of society, presenting classic images of rebellion. Transgender star, Candy Darling, lies dying in her hospital bed. Philip-Lorca diCorcia stages portraits of male prostitutes on the streets of Los Angeles. For John and Furnish, these and similar photographs suggest the fragility that lies at the heart of the human condition.

‘The human condition’? Or the American condition? Or, even more limited, just the New York condition?

Self Portrait, 1985 by Robert Mapplethorpe © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission

• Richard Avedon – Andy Warhol and Members of the Factory, 30 October 1969
• Peter Hujar – transgender actress Candy Darling [an Andy Warhol superstar and a muse of The Velvet Underground] on her Deathbed, 1974
• Larry Clark – from the series Tulsa, 1963 to 1971
• Ryan McGinley:
  • Raina (Falling Bridge), 2005
  • Dakota Hair, 2004
  • Drive in, 2005
  • Self Portrait (Lip Tattoo), 2005
• Alec Soth – Nan’s Bed, Brooklyn, New York, 2018

Robert Mapplethorpe features in most of the other sections but this section contains the biggest sample of his work. The curators explain why:

The collection includes many photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, relished by John and Furnish for their masculine beauty. This selection reveals the artist’s embrace of neoclassicism, as seen in the images of marble busts or chillingly beautiful flower arrangements. But the transgressive Mapplethorpe is also present, including his haunting last self-portrait holding a death’s-head cane. Aged just 42, wheelchair-bound and succumbing to AIDS-related illnesses, Mapplethorpe nonetheless created an enduring statement of human vitality.

• Self Portrait, 1985
• Italian Devil, 1988
• Calla Lily, 1988
• Double Jack in The Pulpit, 1988
• Poppy, 1988
• Self Portrait, 1988
• Apollo, 1988

Poppy, 1988 by Robert Mapplethorpe © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission

Nan Goldin – ‘Thanksgiving’

As the curators write:

Nan Goldin’s photography holds a very special place in the collection. Thanksgiving spans a quarter of a century from Goldin’s youth in Boston to intimate snapshots of her bohemian circle in New York City. The installation acts as a shrine to friends and lovers – some now deceased – and as a memorial of their love for one another. For John and Furnish, seeing Thanksgiving was a revelation and they immediately identified with the shared joy and vulnerability the artwork conveys.

And:

A 149-image series, shown in its entirety in the exhibition, ‘Thanksgiving’ documents events from 1973 to 1999 and depicts some of the most intimate and emotional moments in Goldin and her community’s lives, from the euphoric to the sensual to the distressing. Displayed floor to ceiling, the photographs become an intense homage both to the friendships that survived those twenty-six years, and to those friends she has lost.

Exhibitions often talk about immersive experiences but this genuinely is one. They’ve created a space (not really a room since the walls don’t reach to the floor, more a square space created by four walls suspended from the ceiling) which are absolutely covered with scrappy, spontaneous-feeling photos of Goldin’s extended circle of friends over many years. Suffice to say that these people lived in amazing squalor, mess and degradation in what look like a series of squats, skinny half-dressed, in all kinds of casual poses, at parties, at home, in unmade beds. I found it fascinating to enter and completely surrounded by so many powerful images of Bohemian poverty and squalor. The woman I visited with felt so desperately sad for these woeful looking waifs and strays that the total immersion in their squalid lifestyle made her want to cry and she had to exit the rather claustrophobic space. Either way, it’s a powerful experience.

Nan Goldin, Jimmy Paulette and Taboo! In the Bathroom, 1991 Nan Goldin © Nan Goldin. Courtesy of Nan Goldin and Gagosian

7. Constructed Images

Since the late 1970s, advances in printing technology have enabled photographs to become bigger, bolder and more closely integrated with the worlds of fashion, film and advertising. The theatricality and playfulness of these works resonate with Elton John and David Furnish who understand the skill required to create visual spectacle.

Constructed images allow photographers to articulate different identities and more challenging narratives. Whether grappling with politics, presenting personal histories or investigating the nature of photography, these pictures often invite us to question our perceptions. Artists such as Mickalene Thomas and Lalla Essaydi stage scenes to explore the performative nature of femininity, sometimes even casting themselves in the lead role as in the work of Cindy Sherman. Others in this section create physical interventions, collaging, cropping, smashing and manipulating the picture surface. These experimental works offer endless possibilities for telling stories through the lens.

By this point of the exhibition we had been exposed to maybe 200 striking, vivid, moving, historic, glamorous and evocative photographs by a wide range of modern masters. I’d have been quite happy for it to have ended with Robert and Nan’s New York mementoes. But there’s still a lot more still to process.

I don’t know whether the quality fell off or I was just exhausted. There seemed to be fewer striking images in this section, and the notion of constructed images justified some very contrived pieces such as Yasumasa Morimura’s jokey recreation of the famous portrait of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out, but redone as pastiche. In a similar vein – pastiche and parody – is Cindy Sherman’s famous sequence of herself posing as various Hollywood stereotypes. America. New York. Hollywood.

Sherman was the subject of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

Untitled Film Still #17, 1978 by Cindy Sherman © Cindy Sherman, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth Gallery

There are more non-Americans in this section, including works by Japanese and German photographers.

• Hiro (Yasuhiro Wakabayashi) – Shinjuku Station, Tokyo, Japan, 1962
• Andreas Gursky – Pyongyang II, 2007, a vast panorama capturing the Arirang Mass Games in
  Pyongyang: I’ve been staggered by Gursky’s huge images of vast scenes in other settings, notably at the Hayward Galley exhibition devoted to him, but here this one-off image felt cramped and failed to impact

But America still dominates, typified by a big work by Alex Prager (Crowd #1 (Stan Douglas) from 2010). The Prager was a good example of the approach thoroughly covered in the exhibition devoted to her at the Photographers’ Gallery.

There are three big colour photos by David LaChapelle, depictions of rather laboured visual jokes:

• Leonardo DiCaprio: Illusion of Levitation, Hollywood, 1995
• Tupac Shakur: Becoming Clean, Los Angeles, 1996
• Elton John: Egg On His Face, New York, 1999

Elton John: Egg On His Face, New York, 1999 by David LaChapelle © David LaChapelle

Crying men by Sam Taylor-Johnson

Another sequence, to set beside Mapplethorpe’s flowers and the powerful Nan Goldin installation, was a series by film-maker Sam Taylor-Johnson called ‘Crying Men‘ (2004). Now it would have been something if she had asked ordinary men to express their feelings, just regular guys, especially from Taylor-Johnson’s own country, England (she was born in Croydon). But that would be to mistake the entire ethos of John and Furnish’s collection and of this exhibition, which, as I’ve mentioned, is characterised by – indeed stricken by – glamour and stardust.

And so Sam Taylor-Johnson asked ‘some of Hollywood’s greatest male talents’, including Hayden Christensen, Benicio del Toro, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Laurence Fishburne, Michael Gambon, Robin Williams and Daniel Craig, to act tearful, and snapped the results.

The seven big colour photos cover a wall and you can play the game of who is the most convincing cryer. For me it was Daniel Craig, who looked genuinely distraught, followed by Robin Williams, our reading of the latter influenced by knowledge of his sad end.

Crying Men (Laurence Fishburne), 2002 by Sam Taylor-Johnson © Sam Taylor-Johnson

The photos in this section were big in a way nothing up to his point had been. New digital technology and print capacity has allowed photographs to become ever-larger, with mixed results. There was a big striking image of an orange fabric forming an abstract sculpture in a landscape – K9 (2018) by Eamonn Doyle – which is, the label tells us, part of a series keening for his dead mother. But in the midst of so much parody, pastiche, burlesque and play-acting, it was hard to take it seriously. I mean it was difficult to switch gear from admiring artifice and contrivance to registering something which actually seemed to be serious.

It was also noticeable that for the first time many of the photos in this section are not from America. Photographers from China, Japan, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Ireland, Germany and Morocco are featured.

• Lalla Essaydi – Bullets Revisited #20, 2013
• Carrie Mae Weems – Mirror Mirror, 1987–88
• Wang Qingsong – Sentry Post, 2002
• Zhang Huan – To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain, 1995

8. Towards Abstraction

Drawn to the challenge of pushing at the boundaries of image-making, Elton John and David Furnish have built a significant collection of abstract photography. Abstraction enables artists to exploit the malleability of their medium, offering a way of propelling the image beyond ordinary appearances. It provides a means of exploring the creative scope of camera processes, expanding our understanding of what a photograph might be.

John and Furnish collect works that move along a continuum of form, hovering between the delineation of objects and pure abstraction. The selection here investigates a range of techniques, including colour photograms by Adam Fuss, and black and white cameraless photographs by James Welling and Alison Rossiter. Other images reveal the sublime architecture of New York City or extend an artistic obsession with the body as a site of visual experiment.

• Richard Caldicott:
  • Untitled #59, 1998
  • Untitled #169, 2000
  • Untitled #63, 1998
• Thomas Ruff – Nudes vo18, 2002
• Alison Rossiter – Gevaert Gevarto 48K, exact expiration date unknown, ca. 1960s, processed 2013 (#17), 2013
• Ray K. Metzker – Nude Composite, 1966
• Wolfgang Tillmans – Super Collider #3, 2001

Tillmans was the subject of a big exhibition at Tate Modern.

There’s a work by Hiroshi Sugimoto who was the focus of a wonderful exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. Niko Luoma makes abstract versions of well-known artworks, in this case a well-known painting by David Hockney – ‘Self-Titled Adaptation of A Bigger Splash (1967), 2019’, which was interesting but not compelling.

Most striking, for simple biographical reasons, was the big photogram portraits of John and Furnish’s children, taken by Adam Fuss:

To create his photograms, Adam Fuss lays a piece of unexposed photographic paper at the bottom of a shallow pool of warm water. A parent briefly places their baby in the pool, and a burst of flashlight captures its shape on the paper. The result is a unique portrait silhouetted against a golden light. Here, John and Furnish’s two children, Zachary and Elijah, have been immortalised in a baptism by  photography.

Zachary, 2011 by Adam Fuss © Adam Fuss. Courtesy of the artist and Fraenkel Gallery San Francisco

9. Collecting Now

Elton John and David Furnish continue to acquire photography, adding regularly to their holdings. New purchases keep collectors sharp, incrementally shifting the shape and meaning of the whole collection. The latest acquisitions featured here embody themes that resonate throughout the exhibition, of the intense vulnerability that underpins creativity, of the essential fragility of existence. The couple continue to explore multiple, complex sensibilities in their passion for photography. Fragile beauty is the filament that binds it all together.

The last space is brief, with only half a dozen bang up-to-date works:

• Thomas Struth – X-ray Telescope, CAST, CERN, Ferney-Voltaire, 2021
• Zanele Muholi – Labo I, Torino, Italy, 2019
• Trevor Paglen – Bloom (#a5808a), 2020
• An-My Lê – Fragment IX: Jefferson Davis Monument, Homeland Security Storage, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2017, from the series Silent General, 2015–present
• Wardell Milan – Here the mysterious host – raised in the South, now based in the North curates a
  gathering of friends seeking sanctuary, 2020
• Tyler Mitchell – Simply Fragile, 2022

Simply Fragile, 2022 by Tyler Mitchell © Tyler Mitchell. Courtesy of the artist

The last image, and the one which gives the show its title, is, of course, of an American in America shot by an American. Right to the very end this is a huge, dazzling exhibition of American people, American settings, American issues.

In praise of Elton John

I have nothing but respect for Elton John. I first saw him live in Hyde Park in 1976 where he performed his hit single with Kiki Dee, ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’. He’s a brilliant performer and has had an astonishing career, turning out evergreen pop hits decade after decade.

I also admire the tremendous resilience John showed in the face of the vicious British tabloid press, which hounded him in the 70s and 80s, meretriciously attacking every aspect of his private life, his homosexuality, his substance addictions, his ill-fated first marriage and so on. He is a hero for facing down and surviving the jackals of the British media, and all the other attacks he’s had to endure, not just surviving but triumphing, as recorded in his defiant song ‘I’m still standing’.

Also I admire and respect the work he’s done for charity, especially AIDS charities, as well as the way he’s carried the torch for gay and queer identity through really hard years of persecution in the 1970s and 80s. I think he is an immensely admirable man and I wish him, his husband David, and their two children (I mention them because they feature in the show) nothing but the best.

Criticisms

American cultural imperialism

But oh America, America, and yet again America. More Americana, more American history, more American singers and performers, more Hollywood stars, American glamour and American squalor, American landscapes and American cities, yet another exhibition in London by Americans about America. Yet another example of London art curators’ shameless obeisance to American cultural imperialism.

And the 1960s, again! Dylan and the Beatles and Andy Warhol and Black Power and Robert Kennedy and Vietnam, good grief, yet again these tired, hackneyed images.

I’m afraid the famous photo of the woman wailing over the body of one of the students shot in the infamous Kent State massacre (‘The Grieving Student at Kent State University, 4 May 1970 by John Filo) didn’t trigger distress at the event so much as distress at being caught in the same tired loop of news footage from the 1960s.

By the time I got to the reportage room I was becoming sick of America and all its over-publicised travails. It’s the exhibition equivalent of Groundhog Day, trapped in endless corridors of American art by American artists agonising about bloody America.

I love Elton John and everything he stands for, and he and Furnish have obviously amassed a mind-boggling collection of photographs – but the combination of his stage-struck obsession with music and movie stars, with the New York art and fashion world, and a very New York-centred view of gay and queer identity, dominate the show’s aesthetic from start to finish and ultimately came to feel so very narrow, so very limited.

By contrast, I recommend you visit the Photographers’ Gallery in Soho, where you pay just £8 to see the exhibitions (currently, Ernest Cole from South Africa and Graciela Iturbide from Mexico) or can pop downstairs to the Print Sales Room for FREE, and soak up a continually changing roster of photographers from all round the world, whose work is often strange and unsettling and funny and genuinely original in ways most of the works on display here, in my view, rarely are. I’m just too over-familiar with American culture and, to most intents and purposes, heartily sick of it.

Ryan McGinley

This is the photo, by Ryan McGinley, which has been used for the exhibition webpage, poster, and merchandise.

Dakota Hair, 2004 by Ryan McGinley © Ryan McGinley Studios

McGinley crops up in several of the sections:

Ryan McGinley caught the attention of New York’s art scene with his raw documentation of himself and his friends on the City’s Lower East Side. From 1999, he photographed every visitor to his apartment, resulting in more than 10,000 Polaroids, each labelled with a date and name. The Polaroids covered his bedroom walls, acting as a backdrop for this intimate sex scene.

And:

Ryan McGinley garnered attention as a photographer of street culture, hanging out with skateboarders, graffiti artists and indie musicians. [In Sam (Ground Zero), 11 September 2001] his friend Sam cycles through the ash and debris at Ground Zero on the day of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. It suggests the desire to investigate an event that would come to define the experience of a generation.

And, regarding this Dakota Hair image:

In the summers of 2004 and 2005, Ryan McGinley left New York City for a series of road trips, driving with teams of models and assistants across the USA. Although carefully planned and produced, the resulting photographs maintain the sense of youthful freedom and spontaneity for which McGinley became  famous. As he put it in 2007, his images envisage, ‘a world that doesn’t exist. A fantasy. Freedom is real. There are no rules. The life I wish I was living’.

American photographers taking American photographs of American people in American cities or American landscapes living out American dreams of glamour, adventure or squalor, trapped inside American culture and the American mindset. It was a relief to exit the exhibition into a gallery full of wonderful works from other countries, times and places, because countries other than America do, in fact, exist.

Related links

• Fragile Beauty continues at the Victoria and Albert Museum until 5 January 2025

More V&A reviews

• More Victoria and Albert Museum reviews