V&A, London
From glossy celebrity portraits through raw news shots to AI-driven abstracts, this epic show captures half a century of iconic images
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.
