In this interview which can be viewed on the museum’s website, the latter specifies: “When Elton and I met, the first night in Windsor [propriété du couple près de Londres]one of the things we immediately found in common was our love of photography. I had books of photographs and Elton actually owned some of those photographs. »
Elton John and David Furnish hold one of the largest private photography collections in the world, with more than 7,000 signed prints by the biggest names in the history of the medium, from the early 20th century to today. The Tate Modern (London) revealed some 150 original prints dating from the 1920s to 1950s, by famous photographers and others lesser known. The V&A then continued the presentation of the collection over the period 1950-2024. The stage of this exhibition at the Jeu de Paume takes up some of its axes, starting with fashion and the first photographs purchased in 1993, by Horst P. Horst, Herb Ritts and Irving Penn.
Pirkle Jones (1914-2009), Sacramento Black Panthers, rally for the release of Huey, Bobby Hutton Memorial Park, Oakland, California, August 25, 1968.
© The Regents of the University of California
The singer-songwriter, knighted by Queen Elizabeth, has since continued to enrich his collection and expand it to all other areas of photography, from nudes to reportage. Beauty and human vulnerability dominate. The music scene, the struggles for civil rights in the United States, gay liberation and the HIV epidemic at the end of the last century are told through photographs with a narrative power as powerful as the 149 color prints of the famous “Thanksgiving” series by Nan Goldin (born in 1953), the story of her life during the AIDS years.
