When the first name is Sir Elton, I’m not sure it’s fair to pretend you are at all going to try to keep up with those Johnses. The means are very different, no matter what. So different, in fact, that the Musée du Jeu de Paume has put together an exhibition titled Fragile Beauty, featuring hundreds of the 7,000 photographs collected by Sir Elton John and his husband, David Furnish. After the first room, filled with gay photography, and by “gay” I don’t necessarily mean joyful, surprisingly with nothing by Erwin Olaf, we discover both celebrated and lesser-known masterpieces collected over more than 30 years. Tracing the history of modern and contemporary photography, the exhibition brings together outstanding works by some of the world’s most influential photographers, spanning from the 1950s to the present. Adapted from the exhibition shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum (2024–2025), it explores five themes, including desire (the gay part), fashion, celebrity, identity, and photojournalism, and features artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Harley Weir, Irving Penn, Diane Arbus, Ai Weiwei, Herbert List, Robert Frank and Nan Goldin. It is an amazing journey through photography, regardless of the fact that it is built from what Elton John was able to collect.
