The latest exhibition of works from Sir Elton John and David Furnish’s vast photography collection is everything you’d expect: sparkling, iconoclastic – and a little basic. The entry point to the V&A’s largest ever photography exhibition promises, as the title Fragile Beauty suggests, the frisson of danger in the pursuit of something beautiful: the first shot that greets us is a portrait of beekeeper Ronald Fischer, with skin crawling with are beloved insects. Richard Avedon found Fischer by placing an advertisement in the American Bee Journal. He gave his babysitter two instructions: don’t laugh and don’t move. Remarkably, Fischer was only stabbed four times.
Avedon’s portrait slaps you in the face with the premise of this show: suffering for your art (or making others suffer for it). The seemingly endless exhibition brings together 300 works from the approximately 7,000 in the collection, but is much more personal than the 2016 Radical Eye show at the Tate, which is set from the 1950s to the present, and so covers John’s own life, as well as the lasting interests of the couple.
The exhibition starts slowly and safely: there are so many iconic fashion images and portraits of stars and divas from the golden age that it could almost be a hall of fame. I feel like I’ve seen many of the photos a thousand times before: I have That Avedon portrait of Nastassja Kinski, then 21, a boa constrictor gliding over her naked body. There is That Irving Penn red painted eyelid photo. Helmut Newton’s Elsa Peretti as Bunny, the New York skyline in the background; Jürgen Teller’s Joan Didion; the Beatles, again photographed by Avedon (more interesting as a portrait is Robert Freeman’s 1964 vision of the famous four – a photo of their boots). Then we have Warhol and Basquiat in boxing gloves, seen through the lens of Michael Halsband in 1985.
These are the definitive images of an era, showcasing the often fateful icons of their time. If you’re a famous icon yourself, you might interact with these images differently. Or perhaps this is the result of a celebrity-obsessed British public. I didn’t have the patience to figure it out.
Besides the obvious, there are a few unexpected moments in these first rooms of what turns out to be a huge, sprawling exhibition that takes many twists and turns. In the fashion section we see Harley Weir’s electric portrait of Senegalese wrestler Moussa N’diaye, who later tragically died on a boat trying to reach Europe. Created for a collaboration with designer Grace Wales Bonner in Dakar in 2015, this shot offers something different from the plethora of large, pristine black and white silver gelatin prints. Weir photographed N’diaye preparing for a fight, for a bit of luck, by taking a ritual shower with goat’s milk, packaged in a Coca-Cola bottle. It portrays the theme of fragile beauty – vulnerability and submission, strength and power – in a deeply moving way.
In the room of celebrity portraits, a parodic shot of Miss Piggy by Norman Parkinson adds a bit of light relief, but seems to deviate 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. Should animals also suffer for art?
A gigantic self-portrait by Gillian Wearing puts a spin on the absurdity of the entire portrait genre, and the raw, raw intimacy of works by Diane Arbus and Peter Hujar negates the perfection that so many of these masters worked so hard 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 in which they are shot: Mahalia Jackson, finger up, mouth open, as if imagining that they hit a high note; Dinah Washington dancing, skirt swishing, white high heels dancing.
Related: ‘I want to be where the energy is’: photographer Ryan McGinley on youth culture, creativity and being collected by Elton John
The main problem with the presentation of this exhibition is that these photographs should and have done so much more than simply reflect John and Furnish’s personal taste. But then again, that’s how a large part of art history was made. One section, Desire, is a room full of photos of naked and semi-naked men from famous photographers, but it feels strangely fetishistic. All photos depict the same type of man: hairless, tight, young, white. When hung together, they feel objectifying. One image says it all: a Ryan McGinley photo of a couple having sex in front of a wall of McGinley’s Polaroids.
Yet there are also surprises in this room: a small, unusual portrait of Fakir Musafar called Perfect Gentleman, Self-portrait, 1955. It is one of the tame works of the American artist, born Roland Loomis, who was known for his radical body . modifications including meat hook hanging, piercing, contortion and tattooing – explorations of past lives that he claimed he had memories of from an early age.
Many of these images are already in the public consciousness and represent important moments. A room of social documentaries includes Boris Yaro’s recording of the moment Robert Kennedy was fatally wounded at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in 1968. The 1970 death of anti-war protester Jeffrey Miller, shot and killed during a demonstration, is commemorated in a photo by John Filo. Richard Drew’s The Falling Man – a shot of someone plunging from the World Trade Center on September 11 and brought into focus on the global consciousness – appears. Like another work by McGinley, a photograph of his friend Sam cycling through ash and smoke in the aftermath of the attacks – a commentary on the need to see suffering and violence, to witness pain and horror and this to document.
Fragile Beauty’s highlights come when it manages to wrest control from the narrative of being part of the John/Furnish collection. A room simply called Atlanta – where John had a house for thirty years, which he recently sold to move back to Britain – provides a fascinating insight into the Southern Gothic in photography. There are optician-turned-photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s totally strange and creepy performative portraits 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 Nevada series, they create an ominous feeling in the landscape of the Deep South. Meanwhile, Alec Soth’s The Farm, Angola State Prison, Louisiana, 2002, in which black prisoners work on the horizon, draws the analogy between America’s largest maximum-security prison and the former plantations in the Mississippi Delta on which it is built.
The highlight of the exhibition, in which photography as an artistic medium is emancipated and distances itself from the document, is morbid and confrontational, although it still focuses mainly on famous and iconic artists. Death, illness, and physical frailty haunt the final rooms, from Nan Goldin’s Thanksgiving shrine, plastered with photos of life on the edge (and Soth’s photo of Goldin’s bed) to Larry Clark’s musings on American rejection and addiction, including a man with a gunshot wound and a pregnant woman shooting up.
Ultimately, it all explodes, in color 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 trembling with pink petals.
Related: Sir Elton John: ‘I collect for beauty, not for value. I am in awe of these things.”
John himself makes a cheeky appearance in a portrait by David LaChapelle, in a café with eggs on his face, toast neatly cut in half on his plate – but Fragile Beauty actually unfolds many different stories, bigger than the personal lives and persistent interests of the two larger than life collectors. Although it draws on the famous and iconic, and follows a story drawn primarily from American and European image-makers, Fragile Beauty is about spectacle and being seen, living and dying, struggling and triumphing. It’s an epic overview that works best if you forget about John and Furnish.
But just in case that does happen, it ends with a gigantic, sparkling E, the last thing you encounter on your way out the door.
• Fragile Beauty is at the V&A, London