If a picture’s worth 1,000 words, Sir Elton John’s extensive collection of photographs would equate to a 7 million-word anthology — and counting. One year when I totalled what we had acquired, it averaged about 1.5 pieces a week,’ Newell Harbin, the Director of Sir Elton John and David Furnish Photography Collection, tells Christie’s. Totalling more than 7,000 works, it is one of the largest private collections of photography in the world.
When Harbin began assisting John with his collection in 2010, he was already a voracious collector. The award-winning musician and philanthropist had fallen in love with photography in the early 1990s when, newly sober, he saw the medium in a fresh light. Over the years, as John’s understanding of the movements within photography grew, he assembled a world-class collection as diverse as his own talents and passions.

Within the photography community, Elton’s love for photographs was an open secret for a while. He collected at the masterpiece level and was behind a lot of great interest and collecting power during the ’90s and the 2000s,’ recalls Darius Himes, Christie’s Deputy Chairman and International Head of Photographs. In 1993, for example, John bought Man Ray’s 1932 image Glass Tears for $193,895, then the highest price for a single photograph at auction.