by 
Several years ago, Newell Harbin was in Elton John’s house – the one in Atlanta, rather than those in Windsor, London, Nice or LA. She had recently been the director of his photo collection, and he was visiting her. Robert Frank’s 1955 picture on a break Trolley – New Orleans, she added an incorrect date. ‘I reached out – “Oh wait, no” – and he didn’t just correct me, he told me what year he bought it and how much he paid. He has 7,000 photos!’
We are at the top of the Victoria and Albert Museum, in a part of the building that would give the haunting architectural fantasies of the artist Piranesi a run for their money. Through dappled glass windows, doves move and bloom into soft shapes. Hundreds of feet below, headlights stream down South Kensington’s Cromwell Road in the late afternoon.
Harbin is here to oversee the installation of Fragile Beauty, an exhibition of around 300 photographs from the collection of Sir Elton John and David Furnish which she has co-curated with the V&A. It is a sequel to 2016’s acclaimed Radical Eye at Tate Modern, which presented modern-era photographs from the collection – prints by Brassaï, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray and the like.
Fragile Beauty spans from 1950 to the present day, and will be the V&A’s largest ever temporary photography exhibition, which is quite a feat when you consider that the museum is home to the national collection of photographic art. But Sir Elton, 77, and Furnish, 61, have quietly earned white knight status in the industry, helping to support and spread information about photographs. In 2014 they lent it to the V&A’s Horst P Horst, and made a ‘significant’ donation to the museum’s expanded Photography Centre. In addition, it would be difficult to exaggerate the strength of their collection, which is appreciated not only for its range and nuance, but also – especially – for the rarity and originality of its prints.
‘Isn’t this wonderful?’ said Harbin, placing Diane Arbus in my hands, which was no bigger than a postcard. It is one of the few girls, it could be said that the American photographer has the most famous image. My heart aches a little at collecting it by numbers, but then Harbin turns it around. On the back is a note from Arbus to her mentor, the great writer Walker Evans, who recognized in her protégée ‘an eye cultivated to show you fear in a handful of dust’.
In the note, she is inviting him to her exhibition – New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. The 1967 show was very important because it showed for the first time that documentary photography could not overcome mere observation. Her influence continues to this day. ‘Isn’t it the whole thing?’ said Harbin, happily.
When Harbin gets going, the child has something excited about her. She swells with rage, in a rhapsody about artists, movements, colors. Her speech is laced with enthusiasm: in the hour we talk, ‘fun’ 25 times, ‘amazing’ 29 and ‘unbelievable’ 30. A minute in her company and you feel it too.
‘Fan. Can I show you this?’ she says, moving around a table covered with framed pictures. It is a 1973 image by William Eggleston of cables trailing across a blood-red ceiling towards a light bulb. The Mississippian was thought to be the first to borrow the ‘dye transfer’ printing process from magazine ads and the color is something else. Next, a self-portrait from 1966 by the late Peter Hujar. In 2022 Sir Elton curated Hujar’s survey for San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery, and Furnish gave him the painting for his 70th birthday. The Harbin couple is often enlisted in this regard: the Tina Barney presented by Sir Elton Furnish in 2011 (below), of two men in the back of a limo, is also in the exhibition.
The couple are serious and strategic collectors, but never want the trophy, Harbin insists. ‘They are out for the piece that speaks to them or moves them.’ The best times, she says, are when they come to her and say, ‘I saw this, it looked like it, you have to find it. Then I do Nancy Drew.’ She laughs. ‘It’s crazy.’
Harbin is 45, with a lilting Southern accent. She is taller than average; dressed stylishly but without any extravagance. She came up through auctioneers MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago and Phillips de Pury, but she’s from Atlanta and got the gig with Sir Elton because she knew Jane Jackson, from the Atlanta gallery Jackson Fine Art.
Jackson has been the director of Sir Elton’s photo collection since 2003, but has been a consultant for much longer. Fortunately, she opened her gallery just before he moved to Atlanta in the early 1990s (he loved the rich music culture and his then-boyfriend, Hugh Williams, lived there) and had his photographic epidemic. . It also happened at the same time he gave up 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] came to lunch and showed them a portfolio of prints. Elton says he saw for the first time how incredible a photograph really was. He saw it with clear eyes – with sober eyes. And that’s the moment he got the bug.’
Sir Elton bought eight photographs then and there – fashion prints by the masters Irving Penn, Horst and Herb Ritts. He recently sold the contents of his Windsor home at Sotheby’s – gold discs, crazy glasses, shoes – but still, prints were relatively cheap at the time; few galleries have shown photographs and auction houses have only recently begun to sell them. It could be argued that Sir Elton bought Man Ray Tears of Glass (1932) for $193,895 in 1993 – then a record for a photograph at auction – helped ignite the boom that followed. Man Ray By Violon d’Ingres (1924) sold for $12.4 million in 2022.
‘When he started collecting,’ says Harbin, who started working with Sir Elton in 2010 and took over as director in 2012, ‘he focused on modernist prints because they tend to be small and he didn’t have much wall space, just his one-room apartment. But then he bought a few more [five] flats and tied them, and he was able to collect a little more too.’
Harbin talks about the recent sale of the 13,000-square-foot Sir Elton and Furnish apartment on Peachtree Road, Atlanta. ‘I don’t know if you’ve seen a picture of it,’ she says, ‘but we hung it salon style [where artworks are placed close together, in multiple rows] and we always used to joke that you couldn’t really see the wallpaper.’ In February, the contents of the apartment fetched $20,537,842 at Christie’s. More than 300 photographs were used in the process, ‘but a collection should be organic, a living and breathing thing’.
Harbin has an assistant in Atlanta and a registrar in London. The collection is held in three climate-controlled, top-secret storage facilities on site. What was she short when she started? ‘Nothing!’ she laughed. ‘I jumped right in. It took a second though. I came from an institutional background and it’s very different in a private collection; you have to understand someone’s taste. I don’t always get it right – 14 years in and I still think, oh, they’re going to want this right away! I need to start my negotiations now! And it is a no. Elton is very determined.’
Does she ever push back? ‘Oh no. I found that out. When I tried to put something back in front of him a few months later – I was very new to the job, but I should have known better. He has an incredible memory. I mean, what was I thinking?’
In 2011, just after the couple’s son Zachary was born, Harbin approached Furnish with an idea. She noticed that they had a ‘babygram’ by Adam Fuss in the collection. The British artist takes photographs (right) of things like clouds of smoke and snakes, but also children. When Harbin suggested he and Sir Elton commission one, Furnish was immediately keen.
Dolling involves placing the baby on its back in a large tray filled with an inch or two of heated water, in the dark. Fuss and the parents wear night vision goggles and each print takes an hour to create – he managed seven each for Zachary and later for the couple’s second son, Elijah. Afterwards, Harbin decided she wanted a baby too: ‘But my children behaved horribly. I was sitting there in goggles, a snake in a cage behind me and my precious children scampering around, screaming for the hills.’ Fuss was patient, but he joked, “Elton’s children were much better.”
In the catalog for Fragile Beauty, the curators remember making some selections standing in Sir Elton and Furnish’s shower room in Windsor. I ask those in the kitchen and bedroom, but Harbin is keeping schtum. Remarkably, the collection contains a wealth of Irving Penns – close to 110 prints, says Harbin, when I ask her – and they also have a complete set of Nan Goldin books. Thanks149 photographs documenting the American photographer’s life in and around heroin addiction between 1973 and 1999. ‘When he saw it, Elton told me, he thought, “This was my life: the love, the loss, the drugs, the to find sobriety.” ‘
Stars of stage and screen play a role in the collection, although usually of the troubled kind – Marilyn Monroe, for example, and Chet Baker. Otherwise, there is little overlap with Sir Elton’s musical career of more than 60 years.
On the other hand, her photojournalistic holdings are ‘enormous’: pictures of civil rights heroes including Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King; of AIDS activity in the 1980s; and 9/11, of which the couple has approximately 2,200 images. A Falling Man – Richard Drew’s famous photograph of a man falling from the World Trade Center – it took Harbin two years to get it. They don’t show it.
‘Elton has been scouring the newspapers ever since,’ she says, ‘which has been getting tough in the last few years with Trump and Ukraine, but once in a while we’ll have a joke; tongue-in-cheek picture captured by some random photojournalist. And we think it’s funny so we bring it in.’
It can’t be easy, to be in someone else’s eyes. ‘Sure. It’s a learning curve. And I get a lot now, a lot more than I did when I was in year two. But you know what? They always surprise me. And I love that. It would be boring if it wasn’t.’
Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection at the V&A from 18 May 2024
until 5 January 2025; vam.ac.uk
