Some years ago, Newell Harbin was at Elton John’s house – the one in Atlanta, as opposed to those in Windsor, London, Nice or LA. She had recently become director of his photography collection, and he was giving her a tour. Pausing by Robert Frank’s 1955 picture Trolley—New Orleans, she dated it incorrectly. ‘I caught myself – “Oh wait, no” – and he didn’t just correct me, he told me what year he bought it and how much he paid. He has 7,000 photographs!’

We are at the top of the Victoria and Albert Museum, in a part of the building that would give the haunting architectural fantasies of the artist Piranesi a run for their money. Through dappled glass windows, pigeons wobble and bloom into soft shapes. Hundreds of feet below, headlights on South Kensington’s Cromwell Road stream into the late afternoon.

Harbin is here to oversee the installation of Fragile Beauty, an exhibition of about 300 photographs from Sir Elton John and David Furnish’s collection that she has co-curated with the V&A. It is a sequel to Tate Modern’s widely acclaimed Radical Eye in 2016, which presented modernist-era photographs from the collection – prints by Brassaï, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray and the like.

Fragile Beauty spans 1950 to the present day, and will be the largest temporary photography exhibition the V&A has ever staged, which is quite something when you consider the museum is home to the national collection of the art of photography. But Sir Elton, 77, and Furnish, 61, have quietly earned a white-knight status in the industry, helping to support and disseminate knowledge about photographs. In 2014 they lent to the V&A’s Horst P Horst retrospective, and made a ‘significant’ donation to the museum’s expanded Photography Centre. Besides, it would be hard to overstate the strength of their collection, which is esteemed not just for its range and nuance, but also – especially – for the rarity and the storied provenance of its prints. 

‘Is this not wonderful?’ says Harbin, placing a Diane Arbus no bigger than a postcard in my hands. It’s the one of twin girls, arguably the American photographer’s most famous image. My heart sinks a little at its collecting-by-numbers-ness, but then Harbin turns it over. On the back is a note from Arbus to her mentor, the great documentarian Walker Evans, who recognised in his protégée ‘an eye cultivated to show you fear in a handful of dust’. 

In the note, she is inviting him to her exhibition – New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. The 1967 show was seminal because it demonstrated for the first time that documentary photography could transcend mere observation. Its influence rumbles on to this day. ‘Isn’t it just the absolute?’ says Harbin, happily. 

When Harbin gets going, there is something of the excited child about her. She bubbles over with elation, in rhapsody about artists, movements, colours. Her speech is strewn with enthusiasms: in the hour we are talking, ‘fun’ 25 times, ‘wonderful’ 29 and ‘incredible’ 30. Minutes in her company and you feel it too.

‘Hold on. Can I show you this?’ she says, moving around a table covered in framed pictures. It is a 1973 image by William Eggleston of cables spidering across a blood-red ceiling towards a light bulb. The Mississippian was thought to be the first to borrow the ‘dye transfer’ printing process from magazine advertisements and the colour is something else. Next, a 1966 self-portrait by the late Peter Hujar. In 2022 Sir Elton curated a Hujar survey for San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery, and Furnish gave him the picture for his 70th birthday. The couple often enlist Harbin in this respect: the Tina Barney that Sir Elton gifted Furnish in 2011 (below), of two men in the back of a limo, is also in the exhibition. 

The couple are serious and strategic collectors, but ‘never out for the trophy piece’, Harbin insists. ‘They’re out for the piece that speaks to them or stirs them.’ The best times, she adds, are when they come to her and say, ‘I just saw this, it looked like this, you’ve gotta find it. Then I become Nancy Drew.’ She laughs. ‘It’s fun.’ 

Harbin is 45, with a lilting Southern accent. She is taller than average; stylishly dressed but without evident extravagance. She came up through MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago and Phillips de Pury auctioneers, but is from Atlanta and got the gig with Sir Elton because she knew Jane Jackson, of the Atlanta gallery Jackson Fine Art. 

Jackson had been director of Sir Elton’s photography collection since 2003, but his adviser for much longer. Fortuitously she opened her gallery just before he moved to Atlanta in the early 1990s (he liked its rich music culture and his then boyfriend, Hugh Williams, was living there) and had his photography epiphany. It also coincided with the moment he quit drugs and alcohol. Harbin tells me the story: ‘He was staying with a friend in the south of France and David Fahey [owner of the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles] came to lunch and showed them a portfolio of prints. Elton says he saw for the first time how incredible a photograph really was. He saw it with clean eyes – with sober eyes. And that was the moment he got the bug.’ 

Sir Elton bought eight photographs there and then – fashion prints by the masters Irving Penn, Horst and Herb Ritts. He had recently sold the contents of his Windsor home at Sotheby’s – gold discs, crazy spectacles, shoes – but still, prints were relatively cheap at that time; few galleries showed photographs and auction houses had only recently begun to sell them. It might be argued that Sir Elton’s purchase of Man Ray’s Glass Tears (1932) for $193,895 in 1993 – then a record for a photograph at auction – helped ignite the subsequent boom. Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres (1924) sold for $12.4 million in 2022.

‘When he started collecting,’ says Harbin, who began working with Sir Elton in 2010 and took over as director in 2012, ‘he focused on modernist prints because they tended to be small and he didn’t have much wall space, only a one-bedroom apartment. But then he bought a couple more [five] apartments and connected them, and he was able to collect a little bit more too.’ 

Harbin is talking about Peachtree Road, Atlanta, the 13,000-square-foot apartment Sir Elton and Furnish recently sold. ‘I don’t know if you’ve seen a picture of it,’ she says, ‘but we hung salon-style [where artworks are placed close together, in multiple rows] and we always used to joke that you could never really see the wallpaper.’ In February, the apartment’s contents fetched $20,537,842 at Christie’s. More than 300 photographs were shed in the process, ‘but a collection ought to be organic, a living, breathing thing’.

Harbin has an assistant in Atlanta and a registrar in London. The collection is held in three climate-controlled storage facilities, location top secret. What was her brief when she started? ‘None!’ she laughs. ‘I jumped right in. It took a second though. I had come from an institutional background and it’s very different in a private collection; you have to understand someone’s taste. I don’t always get it right – 14 years in and still I go in thinking, oh, they’re going to want this immediately! I need to start my negotiations now! And it’s a no. Elton’s very decisive.’ 

Does she ever push back? ‘Oh no. I found that out. Once I tried to put something back in front of him a couple of months later – I was very new in the job, but I should have known better. He has an incredible memory. I mean, what was I thinking?’

In 2011, just after the couple’s son Zachary was born, Harbin approached Furnish with an idea. She had noticed they had a ‘babygram’ by Adam Fuss in the collection. The British artist takes photograms (right) of things like smoke clouds and snakes, but also babies. When Harbin suggested he and Sir Elton commission one, Furnish was immediately keen. 

A babygram involves putting the baby on its back in a giant tray filled with an inch or two of warmed water, in the dark. Fuss and the parents wear night-vision goggles and each print takes about an hour to create – he managed seven each for Zachary and later the couple’s second son, Elijah. Afterwards, Harbin decided she wanted a babygram too: ‘But my children were horribly behaved. I was sat there in goggles, a snake in a cage behind me and my precious babies splashing around, screaming for the hills.’ Fuss was patient, ‘but he joked, “Elton’s children were much better.”’ 

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