A few years ago Newell Harbin was at Elton John’s house; Windsor was at home in Atlanta, as opposed to those in London, Nice or Los Angeles. He had recently become the manager of the photo collection and was giving it a tour. Pause to Robert Frank’s 1955 painting Streetcar – New Orleans, dated it wrong. ‘I caught myself – “Oh, wait, no” – and not only did he correct me, he told me what year he bought it and how much he paid for it. There are 7,000 photos!’
We are at the top of the Victoria and Albert Museum, in a part of the building that will fulfill the artist Piranesi’s haunting architectural fantasies. Behind the mottled glass windows, pigeons sway and form soft shapes. Hundreds of meters below, the headlights of South Kensington’s Cromwell Road shine into the late afternoon.
Harbin is here to oversee the installation of Fragile Beauty, an exhibition of around 300 photographs from Sir Elton John and David Furnish’s collection, curated in conjunction with the V&A. This is Tate Modern’s follow-up to 2016’s critically acclaimed Radical Eye, which presented modernist-era photographs from a collection of prints by Brassaï, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray and the like.
Fragile Beauty spans 1950 to the present and will be the largest temporary exhibition of photography the V&A has ever staged; This is a quite large figure considering that the museum houses the national collection of photographic art. But Sir Elton, 77, and Furnish, 61, have quietly earned white knight status in the industry by helping to promote and spread knowledge about the photographs. They lent it to the V&A’s Horst P Horst retrospective in 2014 and made a ‘significant’ donation to the museum’s expanded Center for Photography. It would also be difficult to overstate the power of their collections, appreciated not only for their diversity and nuance, but also – especially – for the rarity and storied provenance of their prints.
‘Isn’t this wonderful?’ says Harbin, handing me a postcard-sized copy of Diane Arbus. This is arguably the American photographer’s most famous photo of twin girls. The feeling of adding up with numbers made my heart tighten a little, but then Harbin turned the subject around. On the back is a note Arbus wrote to her mentor, the great documentarian Walker Evans; He himself noticed that his protégé had ‘an eye trained to show the fear in a handful of dust’.
The note invites him to the New Documents exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The 1967 exhibition was seminal because it showed for the first time that documentary photography could go beyond mere observation. Its impact continues to this day. ‘Isn’t this just absolute?’ says Harbin happily.
When Harbin moves, he has the air of an excited child. It overflows with enthusiasm with a rhapsody about artists, movements, and colors. His speech is filled with enthusiasm: in the hour we speak he says ‘fun’ 25 times, ‘great’ 29 times and ‘amazing’ 30 times. The moments you spend with him and you feel it too.
‘To continue. Can I show you this?’ he says, moving around a table full of framed pictures. This is a 1973 image by William Eggleston of wires spidering across a blood-red ceiling toward a light bulb. The Mississippian was thought to be the first to borrow the ‘dye transfer’ printing process from magazine advertising, and color was another. Next is the late Peter Hujar’s self-portrait from 1966. In 2022, Sir Elton curated a survey of Hujar for the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, and Furnish gave him the painting for his 70th birthday. The couple often favor Harbin in this regard: Tina Barney (below), which Sir Elton gifted to Furnish in 2011, while a painting of two men sitting in the back of a limousine is also included in the exhibition.
The couple are serious and strategic collectors, but Harbin insists they are “never after trophy pieces.” ‘They are looking for the piece that speaks to them or moves them.’ He adds that the best times are when they come to him and say, ‘I just saw this, it looked like this, you should find it.’ Then I become Nancy Drew.’ Laughs. ‘Fun.’
Harbin is 45 years old and speaks with a vibrant Southern accent. Taller than average; smartly dressed but without obvious extravagance. He came through auctioneers MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago and Phillips de Pury, but he’s from Atlanta and landed the gig with Sir Elton because he knew Jane Jackson of the Atlanta gallery Jackson Fine Art.
Jackson had been director of Sir Elton’s photography collection since 2003, but was his advisor for much longer. Luckily, she opened her gallery just before moving to Atlanta in the early 1990s (she loved the rich musical culture there, and her then-boyfriend, Hugh Williams, lived there) and had her photography epiphany. It also coincided with the moment he quit drugs and alcohol. Harbin tells me the story: ‘He was staying with a friend in the south of France and David Fahey [owner of the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles] He came to lunch and showed them a portfolio of prints. Elton says it was the first time he saw how incredible a photo really was. He saw with clean eyes, sober eyes. That’s when he caught the bug.’
Sir Elton bought eight photographs there; Fashion prints by masters Irving Penn, Horst and Herb Ritts. He had recently sold the contents of his Windsor home at Sotheby’s—gold discs, crazy glasses, shoes—but then again, prints were relatively cheap; Very few galleries exhibited the photographs, and auction houses had just begun to sell them. It could be argued that Sir Elton bought Man Ray. Glass Tears (1932), which sold for $193,895 in 1993 – later setting a photographic record at auction – helped spark the subsequent boom. Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres (1924) sold in 2022 for $12.4 million.
Harbin, who started working with Sir Elton in 2010 and took over as director in 2012, says: ‘When he started collecting he focused on modernist prints because they tended to be small and didn’t have a lot of wall space. one bedroom apartment. But then it took a few more [five] He connected the flats and was able to collect some more.’
Harbin is referring to Atlanta’s Peachtree Road, the 13,000-square-foot apartment that Sir Elton and Furnish recently sold. ‘I don’t know if you’ve seen the picture,’ he says, ‘but we hung it lounge style. [where artworks are placed close together, in multiple rows] and we always joked that you couldn’t really see the wallpaper.’ In February, the apartment’s contents sold at Christie’s for $20,537,842. More than 300 photographs emerged in the process, ‘but a collection has to be an organic, living, breathing thing’.
Harbin has an assistant in Atlanta and a registrar in London. The collection is held in three top-secret, climate-controlled storage facilities. What was it briefly when it started? ‘None!’ Laughs. ‘I jumped right in. But it took a second. I came from a corporate background and the situation is very different in private collections; You have to understand someone’s taste. I don’t always get it right – 14 years later I still think, oh, they’re going to want it now! I need to start my interviews immediately! And that’s a no. Elton is very determined.’
Will he ever step back? ‘Oh no. I learned this. Once, a few months later, I tried to put something in front of him; I was very new to the job, but I should have known better. He has an incredible memory. So what was I thinking?’
Just after the couple’s son Zachary was born in 2011, Harbin approached Furnish with an idea. She noticed Adam Fuss’s ‘babygram’ was in the collection. The British artist takes photograms of babies (right) as well as smoke clouds and snakes. When Harbin suggested that he and Sir Elton commission one, Furnish was immediately keen.
Babygram involves placing the baby on his or her back in the dark on a giant tray filled with an inch or two of warm water. Fuss and his parents wear night vision goggles, and each print takes about an hour to create; He managed seven for Zachary and later for the couple’s second son, Elijah. Then Harbin decided she wanted a babygram too: ‘But my children were treated so badly. ‘I was sitting there with glasses on, a snake in a cage behind me and my precious babies splashing around and screaming for the hills.’ Fuss was patient, ‘but he joked: ‘Elton’s kids were much better.”
In the Fragile Beauty catalogue, curators recall Sir Elton and Furnish making some choices while standing in the Windsor shower room. I ask about the things in the kitchen and bedroom, but Harbin doesn’t mince words. As everyone knows, the collection is rich in Irving Penns—Harbin says close to 110 prints when I ask him—and there’s also a complete set by Nan Goldin Thanksgiving149 photographs documenting the American photographer’s life in and around his heroin addiction between 1973 and 1999. ‘When Elton saw this he said to me: ‘This was my life: love, loss, drugs, finding sobriety.’ ‘
Stars of stage and screen play a role in the collection, although they are often of the problematic variety – Marilyn Monroe and Chet Baker, for example. Otherwise there is little overlap with Sir Elton’s musical career spanning more than 60 years.
On the other hand, the photojournalism assets are ‘huge’: photographs of civil rights heroes such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King; AIDS activism in the 1980s; and 9/11, the couple has nearly 2,200 photographs. Falling Man – It took Harbin two years to obtain Richard Drew’s famous photograph of a man falling from the World Trade Center. They don’t show this.
‘Elton has been scanning the papers ever since,’ he says. ‘It’s gotten more intense over the last few years with Trump and Ukraine, but every once in a while we get a funny situation; A playful photo captured by a random photojournalist. And we think it’s hilarious, so we’re bringing it.’
Being someone else’s eyes can’t be easy. ‘Definitely. It’s a learning curve. And I’m getting a lot now, a lot more than I got in my second year. But do you know? They always surprise me. And I love it. It would be boring if they didn’t.’
Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Collection of Sir Elton John and David Furnish At the V&A from 18 May 2024
Until January 5, 2025; vam.ac.uk