Shots of immense power in Elton's expansive collection

Fragile Beauty is home to stunning prints gathered by the singer and his husband, exploring subjects including fashion, desire and reportage from war zones

-  Mark Hudson

It’s only eight years since the last major London museum show of photographs from Sir Elton John and David Furnish’s collection. Yet such is the scale of the couple’s holdings and the speed of their collecting they could probably have mounted 10 exhibitions over that period without repeating a single work.

Tate Modern’s 2016 show The Radical Eye focused on Sir Elton’s first photographic love, classic early modernist photography, often severely abstract and almost exclusively in black and white – a taste that might seem surprising in so flamboyant a figure. The far larger Fragile Beauty takes us into the succeeding era, from the post-war period to date, with the couple’s personal preoccupations explored through iconic images by some of the world’s greatest photographers. Themes include fashion, celebrity, desire as represented by the male body, and the idea, suggested in the show’s title, of beauty as something vulnerable, even inherently tragic. Indeed, judging by the advance images, anyone who felt short-changed by the Tate show’s lack of highstyle glitz and rampant homoeroticism will be in seventh heaven here.