If a picture’s worth 1,000 words, Sir Elton John’s extensive collection of photographs would equate to a 7 million-word anthology — and counting.
‘One year when I totalled what we had acquired, it averaged about 1.5 pieces a week,’ Newell Harbin, the Director of Sir Elton John and David Furnish
Photography Collection, tells Christie’s. Totalling more than 7,000 works, it is one of the largest private collections of photography in the world.
When Harbin began assisting John with his collection in 2010, he was already a voracious collector. The award-winning musician and philanthropist had
fallen in love with photography in the early 1990s when, newly sober, he saw the medium in a fresh light. Over the years, as John’s understanding of the
movements within photography grew, he assembled a world-class collection as diverse as his own talents and passions.
‘Within the photography community, Elton’s love for photographs was an open secret for a while. He collected at the masterpiece level and was behind a
lot of great interest and collecting power during the ’90s and the 2000s,’ recalls Darius Himes, Christie’s Deputy Chairman and International Head of Photographs.
In 1993, for example, John bought Man Ray’s 1932 image Glass Tears for $193,895, then the highest price for a single photograph at auction.
The public came to know John’s impressive trove of photographs, which charts the rise of the medium from 1910 onwards, through the exhibitions Chorus of Light
at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art in 2000 and The Radical Eye at London’s Tate Modern in 2016–17. Beginning 18 May 2024, more than 300 images from John and Furnish’s
collection will be unveiled at the Victoria and Albert Museum in Fragile Beauty, the institution’s largest photography exhibition to date.
‘Within the photography community, Elton’s love for photographs was an open secret for a while. He collected at the masterpiece level and was behind a lot of great
interest and collecting power during the ’90s and the 2000s,’ recalls Darius Himes, Christie’s Deputy Chairman and International Head of Photographs. In 1993, for
example, John bought Man Ray’s 1932 image Glass Tears for $193,895, then the highest price for a single photograph at auction.
The public came to know John’s impressive trove of photographs, which charts the rise of the medium from 1910 onwards, through the exhibitions Chorus of Light at
Atlanta’s High Museum of Art in 2000 and The Radical Eye at London’s Tate Modern in 2016–17. Beginning 18 May 2024, more than 300 images from John and Furnish’s
collection will be unveiled at the Victoria and Albert Museum in Fragile Beauty, the institution’s largest photography exhibition to date.
‘It’s amazing what Elton can put on the wall and get away with versus what other people can,’ says Harbin of the diversity of John’s collection, which he hung salon
style to maximise space. In addition to his 13,500-square-foot apartment, John also maintained a studio at Park Place where Harbin managed and conserved the photographs
, which are especially sensitive to light and humidity. ‘Because of how large our collection is, we have the ability to rotate photographs in the way that they should be
rotated to keep the prints to a museum-quality level.’
