In the catalogue for Fragile Beauty, the curators recall making some selections standing in Sir Elton and Furnish’s Windsor shower room. I ask about those in the kitchen and the bedroom, but Harbin is keeping schtum. Notoriously, the collection is rich in Irving Penns – close to 110 prints, Harbin says, when I ask her – and they also have a complete set of Nan Goldin’s Thanksgiving, 149 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, finding sobriety.”’
Stars of stage and screen play a role in the collection, though they tend to be the troubled kind – Marilyn Monroe, for instance, and Chet Baker. Otherwise, there is little overlap with Sir Elton’s music career of more than 60 years.
Their photojournalism holdings, on the other hand, are ‘massive’: pictures of civil rights heroes including Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King; of Aids activism in the 1980s; and 9/11, of which the couple have some 2,200 images. Falling Man – Richard Drew’s famous photograph of a man plummeting from the World Trade Center – took Harbin two years to acquire. They don’t display it.
‘Elton’s been scouring the newspapers ever since,’ she says, ‘which has got intense over the last few years with Trump and Ukraine, but every once in a while we’ll get a funny; a tongue-in-cheek picture some random photojournalist captured. And we just think it’s hilarious so we bring it in.’
It can’t be easy, being someone else’s eyes. ‘Definitely. It’s a learning curve. And I get a lot right now, a lot more than I did when I was year two. But you know what? They always surprise me. And I love that. It would be boring if they didn’t.’
Fragile Beauty: Photographs From the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection is at the V&A from 18 May 2024
to 5 January 2025; vam.ac.uk
