Earlier this year in Stockholm, Elton John performed the final concert in his five-year Farewell Yellow Brick Road world tour, bringing down the curtain on one of the most successful music careers in history. Yet anyone expecting the global superstar and hugely influential activist to sink quietly into the oblivion of retirement is badly mistaken.

This week, the Victoria and Albert Museum announced the biggest photography exhibition in its history, to open next May, and drawn entirely from the collection of Sir Elton and his husband, David Furnish. Comprising 300 works by 41 artists, it not only features some of the most iconic images in the history of the medium, but announces John as one of the most significant collectors of the post-war era. “Everything [in my collection] has been chosen by me,” Sir Elton told The Observer in 2016. “My curator will suggest stuff, but nobody goes and collects on my behalf. I’m not known for my restraint, but for me this collection is about love, not collecting for the sake of it or grandstanding.”

Certainly, as you’d expect from a singer-songwriter whose trademarks include diamond-studded glasses, diamond-studded jackets and diamond-studded, well, everything, John never does things by halves. He began collecting photography in 1990 after successfully entering rehab following a 20-year struggle with cocaine addiction. He now has 9,000 works in his possession – a number that dwarfs that of many major museums – and which require the services of a full-time director. In 1993, he set the then record price for a single photograph when he paid £112,000 for Man Ray’s Surrealist masterpiece Glass Tears.