Notoriously private public figures, the British Royal Family are everywhere and nowhere, hiding in plain sight. This is perhaps why; when they throw us a bone and allow us a peek into their previously unseen lives, we jump. 

A new exhibition at The King’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace, London, will reveal the tales behind 100 years of Royal images captured by the likes of Cecil Beaton, Anthony Armstrong-Jones, and Lord Snowdon. 

Among the original works is the personal portrait kept by the Queen Mother of her daughter Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953, signed by the late Queen. 

The array of photographs charts the evolution of Royal portrait photography from the 1920s to the present day, through more than 150 items from the Royal Collection and the Royal Archives. 

“The Royal Collection holds some of the most enduring photographs ever taken of the Royal Family, captured by the most celebrated portrait photographers of the past hundred years – from Dorothy Wilding and Cecil Beaton to Annie Leibovitz, David Bailey, and Rankin,” said Alessandro Nasini, curator of Royal Portraits: A Century of Photography.

“Alongside these beautiful vintage prints, which cannot be on permanent display for conservation reasons, we are excited to share archival correspondence and never-before-seen proofs that will give visitors a behind-the-scenes insight into the process of creating such unforgettable royal portraits.”

Visitors will see the earliest surviving photographic print of a member of the Royal Family in color: Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester and sister-in-law to King George VI and Edward VIII, on her wedding day. 

The photo was taken in 1935 by Madame Yevonde, a pioneer of color photography and champion of women photographers. 

Previously unreleased wartime images by Cecil Beaton will be on display for the first time, including a photograph of King George VI and the Queen Mother comforting each other while inspecting bomb damage at Buckingham Palace. 

The incredible photograph from 1940 shows how the royal couple used photography to project a sense of stability and hope for the nation during World War II. 

Visitors will also see annotated contact sheet proofs from Elizabeth II’s Coronation, with a note from Martin Charteris, the Queen’s Assistant Private Secretary, recommending to Prince Philip which images should be sent as personal mementos to the Royal Family and Maids of Honour.

Also on display will be photographs from the 1980s and 2020s highlighting the revolutionary way in which photography and tastes have evolved. These include Rankin’s 2001 photograph of the Queen smiling against a glittering gold backdrop, Andy Warhol’s 1985 portrait of Her late Majesty, sprinkled with diamond dust to make it sparkle, and The Princess of Wales when she was the Duchess of Cambridge by Paolo Roversi, 2021. 

The exhibition opens today and can be visited every day except Tuesdays and Wednesdays until October 06 2024. Tickets cost £19.00 for adults, £12.00 for 18-24s, and £9.50 for 5-17s and disabled guests. Access companions and under 5s can visit free, and a £1 ticket offer for those on named benefit schemes is available May 17 – July 08. 

For more information and to purchase tickets, visit the official exhibition webpage. 

Check out our guide to the best cameras for portrait photography, along with the best lenses for portraits. If you want to create photos with a more vintage feel, why not check out our list of the best film cameras around. 

The latest exhibition of works from Sir Elton John and David Furnish’s gargantuan photography collection is everything you’d expect it to be: spangly, iconoclastic – and a little bit basic. The entry point to the V&A’s largest ever exhibition of photography promises, as the title Fragile Beauty suggests, the frisson of danger in the pursuit of creating something beautiful: the first shot that greets us is a portrait of beekeeper Ronald Fischer, skin crawling with his beloved insects. Richard Avedon found Fischer by putting an ad in the American Bee Journal. He issued two instructions to his sitter: don’t smile and don’t move. Remarkably, Fischer was only stung four times.

The Avedon portrait smacks you in the face with the premise of this show: suffering for one’s art (or making others suffer for it). The seemingly never-ending exhibition unifies 300 works drawn from about 7,000 in the collection, but it is far more personal than the 2016 Radical Eye show at Tate, moving from the 1950s to now, and so spanning John’s own life, as well as the couple’s enduring interests.

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The exhibition starts slow and safe: there are so many iconic fashion images and portraits of golden era stars and divas that it might almost be a hall of fame. I feel like I’ve seen many of the photographs 1,000 times before: there’s that Avedon portrait of Nastassja Kinski, then 21, a boa constrictor slithering over her naked body. There’s that Irving Penn red lacquered eyelid picture. Helmut Newton’s Elsa Peretti as Bunny, the New York skyline in the background; Juergen Teller’s Joan Didion; the Beatles, again shot by Avedon (more interesting as a portrait is Robert Freeman’s 1964 vision of the famous four – a shot of their boots). Then we have Warhol and Basquiat in boxing gloves, as seen through Michael Halsband’s lens in 1985.

These are the definitive images of an era, showing the often ill-fated icons of their time. Perhaps if you’re a famous icon yourself, you relate to these images differently. Or maybe this is the corollary of a celebrity-obsessed British public. I didn’t have the patience to figure it out.

Beyond the obvious, there are a few unexpected moments in these initial rooms of what turns out to be a massive, sprawling exhibition that follows many twists and turns. In the fashion section, we see Harley Weir’s electric portrait of Senegalese wrestler Moussa N’diaye, who later died tragically on a boat trying to reach Europe. Taken for a collaboration with designer Grace Wales Bonner in Dakar in 2015, this shot offers something different to the glut of large, pristine black and white silver gelatin prints. Weir photographed N’diaye as, for luck, he prepares for a fight by taking a ritual shower of goat’s milk, contained in a Coca-Cola bottle. It ticks the theme of fragile beauty – vulnerability and submission, strength and power – in a profoundly moving way.

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In the room of celebrity portraits, a parodic shot of Miss Piggy by Norman Parkinson adds a bit of light relief, but seems to swerve away from the theme. It is presented next to a portrait of Doris Day posing with a group of poodles, their fur dyed in pastel shades, for the cover of Collier’s magazine in 1952. Must animals also suffer for the art?

A giant Gillian Wearing self-portrait puts a spin on the absurdity of the whole genre of portraiture, and the gritty, raw intimacy of works by Diane Arbus and Peter Hujar undoes the perfection so many of these masters went to great lengths to achieve. William Claxton’s behind-the-scenes portraits of American musicians in the 1950s and 1960s have a looser, dynamic, improvised energy mimetic of the clubs and backstage areas they were shot: Mahalia Jackson, finger raised, mouth open, as you imagine she hits a high note; Dinah Washington dancing, skirt swishing, white high heels jiving.

The main issue with the presentation of this exhibition is that these photographs were intended to, and have done, so much more than reflect John and Furnish’s personal tastes. But then, that is how so much of art history has been made. One section, Desire, is a roomful of pictures of naked and semi-naked men by famous photographers, but it feels strangely fetishistic. All the photographs depict the same type of man: hairless, taut, young, white. Hung together they feel objectifying. One image says it all: a Ryan McGinley photograph of a couple having sex in front of a wall of McGinley’s Polaroids.

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Yet in this room there are also surprises: a small, unusual portrait by Fakir Musafar called Perfect Gentleman, Self-portrait, 1955. It’s one of the more tame works by the American artist, born Roland Loomis, who was known for his radical body modifications, including flesh hook suspension, piercing, contortion and tattooing – explorations of past lives he claimed to have had recollections of from a young age.

Many of these images already belong to the public consciousness, having marked landmark moments. A room of social documentary works includes Boris Yaro’s shot of the moment Robert Kennedy was fatally wounded at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, in 1968. The death of anti-war protester Jeffrey Miller in 1970, shot and killed while at a demonstration, is memorialised in a photograph by John Filo. Richard Drew’s The Falling Man – a shot of someone plummeting from the World Trade Center on 9/11 and seared on to the global consciousness – appears. As does another McGinley work, a picture of his friend Sam as he cycles through ash and smoke in the aftermath of the attacks – a comment on the need to see suffering and violence, to witness and document pain and horror.

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The high points of Fragile Beauty come when it manages to wrest control from the narrative of being part of the John/Furnish collection. A room simply titled Atlanta – where John had a home for three decades, which he recently sold to move back to the UK – gives a fascinating view of the southern gothic in photography. There are the totally weird and eerie performative portraits of optician turned photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard, of friends and family wearing cheap Halloween masks in suburban Kentucky. Together with Sally Mann’s Untitled (Little House), from 1998, and Lewis Baltz’s series Nevada, they create a sense of foreboding in the landscape of the deep south. Meanwhile Alec Soth’s The Farm, Angola State Prison, Louisiana, 2002, showing black prisoners labouring on the horizon, draws the analogy between America’s largest maximum security prisonand the former plantation lands in the Mississippi delta it is built on.

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The climax of the exhibition, as photography becomes emancipated as an artistic medium and moves away from document, is morbid and confronting, although it still sticks mostly to famous and iconic artists. Death, sickness and physical fragility haunt the last rooms, from Nan Goldin’s commemorative Thanksgiving shrine, plastered with pictures of life on the edge (and Soth’s picture of Goldin’s bed) to Larry Clark’s ruminations on American abjection and addiction, including a man with a gunshot wound and a pregnant woman shooting up.

Eventually it all explodes, into colour and infinity, the space beyond time, body and place, in a modest room of abstract photography, and in new acquisitions, including Trevor Paglen’s AI piece Bloom, of a tree quivering with pink petals.

John himself makes a cheeky appearance in a portrait by David LaChapelle, in a cafe with eggs on his face, toast sliced neatly in two on his plate – but Fragile Beauty really unfolds many different stories, bigger than the personal lives and persistent interests of the two larger-than-life collectors. Although relying on the famous and iconic, and tracing a story mostly through American and European image-makers, Fragile Beauty is about spectacle and being seen, living and dying, struggling and triumphing. It is an epic overview that works best when you forget John and Furnish.

But, just in case you do, it’s signed off with a giant, sparkly E, the last thing you pass on your way out the door.

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Elton John and his husband David Furnish wake up each morning surrounded by walls decorated with hundreds of framed photographs. Their collection, including over 7,000 note-worthy pieces of art, lives with them in homes across three countries.

Now, 300 of their most significant acquisitions will be on display at the Victoria and Albert museum in the institution’s largest photography exhibition to date: Fragile Beauty, which opens in South Kensington on Saturday (May 18).

Like his rhinestone rimmed glasses and bedazzled blazers, John and Furnish’s personal photography collection is a lesson in “more is more” maximalism: black and white Richard Avedon portraits of The Beatles, Joan Didion’s high fashion 2015 Celine campaign shot by Juergen Teller, a close up of John’s own bejewelled hands by Mario Testino.

John began collecting photographs as “a much healthier addiction” after leaving rehab for cocaine use in 1990.

While he was staying in a chateau in the South of France, an LA gallery owner showed him a selection of prints by Herb Ritts, Horst and Irving Penn. “He saw them with his fresh, sober eyes,” says Newell Harbin, director of John and Furnish’s collection. “And it all came to light for him.”

In 2016, the Tate Modern exhibited John’s images that dated between 1910 and 1950. The V&A exhibition picks up where it left off, splitting the mammoth collection into nine rooms: Fashion, Stars of Stage, Screen and Studio, Desire, Reportage, The American Scene, Fragile Beauty, Constructed Images, Towards Abstraction and Collecting Now– a selection of their most recent purchases.

“[Elton and David] have a knowledge of photography that rivals most museum curators,” says the exhibition’s co-curator Duncan Forbes, who began scanning the couple’s photographs, all “hung very high on the walls” in elaborate “salon style”, while sitting at the singer’s kitchen table.

Of the extensive number of artists included in the exhibition, John has outlined provocative sadomasochist Robert Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989, and activist Nan Goldin, who extensively covered the HIV/AIDS crisis and opioid epidemic, as “two photographers of overwhelming importance”.

This is due to both artist’s “recognition that great art is often the product of struggle or vulnerability,” Forbes explains, nodding to the exhibition’s title.

But Fragile Beauty is not depressing. John always intended the exhibition to show “all sides of photography”. To display the serious and the “mischievous” in equal measure, Forbes says.

Case and point, Sam Taylor-Johnson’s 2004 shot of actor Laurence Fishburne crying hangs moments from Yasumasa Morimura’s doctored image of Nobel Prize winning physicist Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out.

Marilyn Monroe is a central figure of the exhibition, with images taken by Elliott Erwitt (on set of the 1961 film The Misfits) and Bert Stern (taken just six weeks before she died in 1962) mounted on a wall of their own.

John has compared his own ability to “turn on” his exuberant Elton John persona to Monroe’s own carefully acted public image.

He had long been fascinated by Monroe’s glamour, but it was only by seeing Stern’s work did he realise how delicate and “beautiful” she was. In 1973, John recorded “Candle in the Wind” in tribute to Monroe.

Around the time of his landmark solo concert an Evening with Elton John in 1999, he bought the entirety of Goldin’s multi image installation Thanksgiving, which covered the White Cube gallery in London from floor to ceiling because the painful images of “drugs, AIDS, [and] debauchery” so reminded him of his own life.

“I don’t think I’ve been moved by anything as much as when I saw that,” John, who has raised $565 million with his charity the Elton John AIDS Foundation, reveals in the exhibition’s accompanying book.

Forbes describes Fragile Beauty as an intensely private collection taken into the public realm with an abundance of “personal meaning” still attached.

Romantically, when John and Furnish met at a mutual friend’s dinner party in 1993, they spent the night looking at Herb Ritts’s 1984 sensual Fred with Tires– an evening that Furnish says gave him courage to come out as gay to his family and friends in Canada.

John and Furnish became fathers when they welcomed their first child, Zachary via surrogacy in 2010. Three years later, their second son Elijah, was born via the same surrogate. John has since called parenthood the “greatest decision” he has ever made.

The couple chose to “celebrate” their sons with photography by commissioning British cameraless artist, Adam Fuss, to take portraits of the infants swimming in a giant steel basin of water over photographic paper, images they say capture the boy’s “individuality” as their silhouettes paddle, suspended in water, over a burnt orange background.

For John, collecting is not dissimilar to fatherhood. He tells Russell Tovey in an interview for the Fragile Beauty book “you have to take care for photography. It’s like having a child. You have to protect it and love it and look after it” from checking the provenance of an image to analysing its condition.

Photography has looked after John, too. When the world has been too overwhelming, he has found solace in the walls that surround him at home. “I can go out on the street, I can walk to a cafe, I can go to a gallery,” his husband tells Tovey. “Elton has had to create a world for himself where he feels at home.”

To his curators, John has likened the instinct to take a photograph to the magic in his music. “Like when you write a song, when you take a photograph, there’s a bit of luck and happenstance in it,” he said.

“Something happens at the right moment and you have to have the intelligence to click on it.”

Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Elton John and David Furnish Collection opens at the Victoria & Albert museum on 18 May

Untitled, 2023

A self-portrait shot in her family home by British artist Lydia Goldblatt. The series Fugue, shot during and post lockdown, examines issues such as intimacy, family, private and public spaces.

Photograph: Lydia Goldblatt/Robert Morat Galerie

• Version 1.7 Picture Perfect is out now
• Participate in a photo op all over the island
• Under the Sea event will begin on May 28th

Sunblink and Sanrio have just released a brand new update for Hello Kitty Island Adventure, bringing a wave of new content and numerous QoL changes to the narrative life sim. Version 1.7 picks up from its predecessor, which introduced Cabins & Castles to the game. As always, it will be exclusively available on Apple Arcade.

Patch 1.7 in Hello Kitty Island Adventure has been titled Picture Perfect, which is an apt name given the primary task you’ll be performing. Prepare yourself to take part in photo ops all over the island as you try to capture beautiful memories. Get all your favourite characters into a single frame and take some gorgeous photographs.

In addition, you can also head to the creation station, which offers a fresh way to design cute outfit items and decorations for your home. If that wasn’t enough, this HKIA update will also feature new avatar improvements, including face and back accessories, which lets you further personalize your character’s look.

Mark your calendars for May 28th as well, as this date signifies the beginning of the Under the Sea event. It promises exciting rewards such as new mermaid tails and themed furniture as you embark on a novel underwater adventure. Furthermore, a unique weather phenomenon called Starfall Weather also takes over the island. It will cause Starchests and Stardrakes to appear in the affected areas, offering a chance to collect loads of special items.

Looking for presents? Your search ends here as we’ve got the perfect guide to finding gifts in Hello Kitty Island Adventure!

It’s about to be another entertaining few weeks in the world of Hello Kitty Island Adventure as the version 1.7 update is currently available on Apple Arcade. Start playing by downloading the game using the link below. You can also visit the official website for more information.

Download now!