Elton John, the Collector Who Stared Back — Blind Journal

Among probably the most affecting works hanging on the partitions of the Jeu de Paume, within the Tuileries Gardens, is The Kentucky Kid: ten prints displaying a boxer combating his personal reflection. Cast because the referee is the nice American photographer Duane Michals, who died not way back. As the wall label places it, the double publicity depicts “a boxer fighting himself, with the photographer himself assuming the role of referee, hinting at intimate, personal struggle.”

How might one not learn this as a projection of Elton John himself, a homosexual artist just like the photographer, who spent a long time combating his personal demons? Alcohol and cocaine, in his personal phrases, turned him into “a monster.” In July 1990, on the age of 43, the British popstar entered rehab and overcame, alongside the way in which, his struggles with bulimia.

The spark for pictures got here the next yr, on the dwelling of a buddy, Alain Dominique Perrin, then president of Cartier and now president of the Jeu de Paume. Through him, Los Angeles artwork supplier David Fahey introduced over black-and-white prints by Herb Ritts, Horst P. Horst and Irving Penn. “I looked at them and bought about ten,” John recollects. “I’d never been interested in photography until that point.”

Two years later, he met David Furnish, his future husband, himself a lifelong lover of photographs since his early profession in promoting: “Photography always spoke to me,” Furnish confides, recalling their early evenings spent leafing via books by Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber on the couch. “I had the books. He had the photographs.”

Together, the couple started constructing a set that now numbers near 7,000 prints, 300 of that are on present in Paris, charting the historical past of pictures. At dwelling, within the purest custom of the English gallery wall, their pictures cowl virtually each spare inch of wall.

The first world to seduce Elton John, and a lifelong ardour for David Furnish, style opens the present. Irving Penn, the primary photographer the couple collected in depth, stated of his personal work that he “sold dreams, not clothes.”

In 1955, his fellow studio muse Dovima poses on the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris amongst elephants, draped within the first design Yves Saint Laurent created for Christian Dior, beneath Richard Avedon’s lens. “That’s pure surrealism,” John declares, admitting he hesitated for a very long time earlier than shopping for it: “I was persuaded to buy that photograph, and I thought, later on: thank God. It’s one of the greatest photographs of all time.”

Among the numerous masterworks is one other sequence by Duane Michals, The Unfortunate Man Could Not Touch the One He Loved, which presents, within the wall label’s phrases, “a poetic yet direct depiction” of the ache attributable to the criminalisation of same-sex love. A big a part of the gathering is dedicated to queer pictures, usually explicitly erotic.

Robert Mapplethorpe frames the genitals of his lover Patrice on the lifeless centre of the picture, in 1977. He described his discoveries of the right male type in pictures as “a manifestation of the divine.” His structured composition of sunshine and texture, the label notes, converges on this portrait “where a man’s crotch fills the frame in a delicate play of shadow and fabric.”

A founding determine of BDSM and fetish tradition, Fakir Musafar poses in a three-piece go well with, cigarette in hand, a candle fastened to his thigh, in his self-portrait Perfect Gentleman (1959): he considered physique modification, the label explains, as “a transcendent experience, attached to feelings of pain, desire and ‘intense sensation.’”

Elsewhere, Minor White, in 1947, pictures a single naked foot within the half-light. A wall label recollects that, on the time, homosexuality remained unlawful within the United States: “the title of this photograph suggests the difficulty of openly representing forbidden desire.”

Elton John’s sympathy for many who endure extends to those that burned brightest beneath the highlight. “John is fascinated by those who suffered for their art,” the exhibition’s curators remind us, and the gathering accordingly holds “multiple, extraordinary images of Marilyn Monroe and Chet Baker.”

The Hollywood icon has fascinated the singer since boyhood: he would later pay tribute to her in “Candle in the Wind” (1973), a track devoted to “one of Hollywood’s most alluring and tragic figures.” In Herman Leonard’s 1956 {photograph}, Chet Baker hides his excellent jawline behind his beloved trumpet, as if to attract the attention away from his personal personal wreckage.

As for Irving Penn’s {photograph} of Miles Davis’s hand, turned by the sunshine into one thing like a pharaoh’s, Elton John sees in it the abstract of a life-time: “It says so much about Miles Davis. You can see all the pain, all the happiness, all the work he’s done.”

A spotlight of the exhibition, an set up by Nan Goldin occupies a complete room inside a room on the Jeu de Paume: 149 Cibachrome prints, made between 1973 and 1999, hung ground to ceiling. “The installation acts as a shrine to friends and lovers, some now deceased, and as a memorial to their love for one another.”

John recollects discovering it at London’s White Cube gallery, the place supplier Jay Jopling reportedly suggested him to purchase the entire set moderately than a single print: “I did end up buying the whole thing,” the British popstar admits, “and I’m glad I did, because it’s simply a masterpiece. Her soul, hanging on a wall.”

The assortment additionally brings collectively portraits of “many heroic figures from the civil rights struggle: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, Angela Davis, John Lewis.” Eve Arnold pictures, for Life journal in 1962, the profile of Malcolm X in Chicago; Stephen Somerstein captures Coretta Scott King beside her husband, relaxed, on the margins of one of many Selma to Montgomery marches.

Another picture expensive to the collector, taken fifty-five years later by Jemal Countess, reveals the hearse carrying the physique of John Lewis, “that great Black American man” he admires, about to cross the bridge at Selma, the very spot the place he was crushed in March 1965.

The {photograph} of Black Panther Party girls, photographed with raised fists by Pirkle Jones in Oakland in 1968, at a rally for the discharge of Huey Newton, has been stored intact by the collectors, who’ve adopted the official instruction forbidding any retouching or cropping of the picture, preserved as an archival doc.

A serious historic turning level upends this collective historical past: the grimly well-known {photograph} of a person falling from the burning World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, hung within the exhibition’s closing room, dedicated to reportage, is without delay “a totemic image for Elton John” and “one of the most viscerally disturbing photographs in the collection,” says Duncan Forbes.

Sam Taylor-Johnson, photographer and filmmaker, who wrote the afterword to the exhibition catalogue, shares that very same sense of dread. “Of all the photographs featured in this book, Richard Drew’s The Falling Man is the hardest to look at […] The darkness and isolation of the figure give this image the same power as a photograph of war.”

This ardour for breaking information, uncommon amongst collectors, has by no means waned. Since that day in 2001, David Furnish confides, he has scoured the papers for each main occasion, “particularly in recent years, with Trump and the situation in Ukraine.”

This fixed vigilance explains the presence of {a photograph} by Julio Cortez, taken on 29 May 2020 in Minneapolis, 4 nights after George Floyd’s loss of life beneath a police officer’s knee: a protester carries an upside-down American flag in entrance of a burning constructing. The {photograph} would earn Cortez and the Associated Press staff the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography.

Elton John lays out the mechanics with precision: “You look at that image and think ‘that’s really beautiful’, and then you find out what it’s about, and it’s not so beautiful […] That’s the great thing about photojournalism. Those photographs should be seen. They remind people of the cruelty that people suffer in the world all the time.”

That similar cruelty is one the artist himself lengthy fled, earlier than discovering the energy to face it head-on. “Fragile Beauty is a palimpsest of possibilities […] The collection is at times surprising, playful and […] mischievous in spirit. It is also deadly serious,” Duncan Forbes recollects. By buying and selling his addictions for an additional, far much less self-destructive pursuit, he didn’t simply save himself, he additionally assembled “one of the great private collections of photography in the world.”

For this Paris staging, seventeen beforehand unseen prints, drawn from the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s division of Prints and Photography at its Richelieu website, be a part of the show. A calculated modesty accompanies this generosity: the popstar insisted the exhibition ought to by no means develop into a self-portrait. His personal face seems simply as soon as on the partitions of the Jeu de Paume, in a playful David LaChapelle portrait, the place he slips two fried eggs beneath his glasses. So Elton!

“Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection” is on view on the Jeu de Paume, in Paris, till 27 September 2026.

The exhibition catalogue, Fragile Beauty, co-published by the Jeu de Paume and 5 Continents Editions, is obtainable for €39.