That's so beautiful, isn't it? Elton and David, thank you so much for sitting down with me
today. Over the last 30 years you have amassed a photography collection of over 7,000 prints and it has been a joy to work with you in the past 13 years. Starting with Nan Goldin's Thanksgiving
series. Wow! That's a big place to start. It's a really big place to start. And believe it or not, we're coming up on almost 25 years ago is when you purchased this piece. I think 1999. That's exactly right From White Cube. And I remember that evening incredibly well. Walk me through that moment. Well, the White Cube gallery at that point literally was a small white cube.
It was a tiny space in St. James that Jay Joplin used to launch a whole generation of British artists and Elton and I were regular clients of Jay's and we walked into the tiny room and...
saw this four-wall installation which took my breath away. I'd never seen anything quite like it. It really took me aback because having walked around and seen most of the photographs,
which took me quite a long time, it bought me back to an era of my life. It was, you know, photographs about AIDS, photographs about addiction, photographs about abuse. and I said to Jay, this is just one of the most incredible things I've ever seen. It was, up to that point, the most powerful thing I'd ever seen in in a gallery. And I said, I can't... I just... how can you buy
one photograph from this exhibition? How can you choose one image that will sum up
the whole thing? It's impossible He said, well buy the whole lot. And I said, okay, I will, if
you give me a great price, I'll buy it because this should be seen in its entirety It's such a major piece, it's one of the biggest, most important pieces of photographic work ever. And it was just wonderful. It introduced me to Nan's work, although I'd heard of her obviously, but what a way to
be introduced to a photographer's work by seeing this on the wall! And it it spoke to to us so personally because of the work that we do with the Elton John AIDS Foundation and how deeply touched we both are by the cause, you know, both Elton and I lived through the 80's which was a very scary, very desperate time for anybody living with AIDS. And Nan depicts this in all of her images of
the Thanksgiving Series where her friend group was hit dramatically by the AIDS virus. It wiped out an entire generation of artists. AIDS was so brutal within that and many other communities
and to see Nan as a survivor and documenting it so personally was incredibly powerful for us. And also the pictures of addiction, which I'd been through myself. I had got sober in 1990, but I'd been there with my alcoholism and my cocaine addiction. That's so beautiful, isn't it? I remember these kind of times. Going out in bars and having the best time. The wistfulness in this is just so beautiful. And the sadness in this. Cookie at the bar. Being on her own. That's
right. Holding her drink, cigarette to the side. Real loneliness there. And then you go to her time in Boston with her group of friends while she's in school. Sitting there on the beach. The Mickey Mouse cover of The Times. There's an element of these that are so carefree and then
you can feel the cloud of addiction and disease coming in. You can feel the longing. Look at her
eyes. The longing for the abusive boyfriend Brian. And even the portrait of him up
there on the top of the bed as well. She took snapshots really, she took snapshots of
her life. This is one of the great collections of photographs from a period of time and it just sums up this time or her time so brilliantly. I just think it's one of the greatest ever photographic achievements. I think it is too. And that is one of the things we love so much.. of the many things we love about photography is the ability to chronicle a time, a moment in time and capture it and preserve it so that it's
around forever and we never forget it. We are coming up now on two exciting pieces
that are actually recent acquisitions within the collection. We've got Wardell Milan and Tyler
Mitchell, both of which are actually Southeastern United States, African-American men. Wardell's from Tennessee. That's exactly right. And Tyler's from Atlanta. When we saw Wardell Milan's work especially, the reason why I think all of us gravitated so much
towards it was because of his cut outs of Mapplethorpe. And Diane Arbus. Two people that were
passionate about collecting. So passionate. And I'm crazy about collage. I know and it's a wonderful use of the medium. It's the most striking image. And it hangs in our house in London and everyone who sees it goes, 'who's that by?' It was my Christmas present. Yeah. With both these images I just want to say how wonderful it is to see African-American artistic voices represented in the photographic world because they have
been underrepresented in the past. It's brilliant to see this talent coming forward. They really booming now. African-American photographers are just really leading the way at the moment and it's so wonderful to see it. And wonderful to see the connection of inspiration so Arbus
and Mapplethorpe turning up in Wardell Milan's work. The fact that Tyler Mitchell was so
strongly influenced by Ryan McGinley and Larry Clark Tyler Mitchel, since we bought that
I see his name everywhere, it's everywhere. Well, a very important artist, he was
the first African-American artist to have a cover on Vogue. Fashion photography has been one of the
biggest sections of your collection. I started with it, that's what started my collection. I was at my friend Alan Perrin’s chateau in the south of France and there was a photographic exhibition and Alan was choosing some photographs and as they were showing him
these Horst and Penns and Ritts, I just went 'Oh my God!' Now I've been around photographers all my life
but I never noticed photography up to that point and they were so beautiful that I also bought
about nine or ten images on the spot – Horst, Penn and Ritts. And that's what started me. I always say
to David Fahey when I see him 'it's your fault'. I think it's a fault that he's very proud
to take. Correct me if I'm wrong but am I right to think that one of your first earliest dates might have been over a Herb Ritts monograph book? Is that correct? It was. When we met the first night down here in Windsor, one of the things we immediately found we had in common was our love of photography. Now, I had the coffee table books of the photographs, Elton actually had some of the photographs. But we opened up some photographic books and we just found we shared the same passion and couldn't stop talking. The Herb Ritts for me is personal on a whole bunch of levels. One is Herb was a dear friend and someone who supported the Elton John AIDS Foundation. Gianni Versace was
Elton's best friend and I remember Gianni talking about what makes a great fashion photograph and
he said with a great fashion photograph you don't remember the model you remember the dress. And
when you look at that photograph that Herb captured in the desert of Christy Turlington with
that beautiful gown, boy do you remember the dress! You remember the dress. Exactly. And the Penn. Well, that's his wife Lisa. That's the great love of his life Like Norman Parkinson, they were both friends. Norman Parkinson and Penn were great friends and the wives were both their muses. And Lisa is just one of the most beautiful, striking women of all time and he photographed her so many times in so many wonderful outfits. This one is especially it's ...it's quite extraordinary this photograph.
For me with Penn, it's always about the precision of the composition. It's the line and the way that everything is so symmetrical and lines up so so beautifully with the Harlequin
dress itself, which is quite geometric. Well this is actually the first year of their marriage
when they took this dress it was wonderful and one of his many many Vogue covers that he shot. He was on staff at Vogue for over 60 years. And I had the great honour of watching Penn photograph
Elton. He shot some distortion portraits of Elton and when that photographic session went into the
diary, I said to Elton there's no way in the world I'm going to miss this one because having admired
Penn both as a fashion photographer and a still life photographer – like the detail that he got into
his still lives is exquisite; the way he can take an everyday object and imbue it with such detail in
life is pretty incredible – so when he was working with Elton, it was the chance to observe a master
at work. I'm so lucky to having my picture taken by Penn, Ritts and Avedon. And David LaChapelle These are the greats of all time. I mean, Penn and I just talked about photographs when he was taking my photograph. as when Lucas Samaras took my photograph, that's
what we talked about. I just wanted to find out, you know, and just listen to them because they're just the masters of what they did. They really are. Robert Mapplethorpe is one of the most collected
artists within your collection. You have over a 100 prints of his and you have around six
self-portraits. What I've noticed is, regardless of the home, at one time or the other you always have one of his self-portraits hanging in one of the residences. Why is that? Why are
the Mapplethorpe self-portraits so important to you? Well, Robert was one of the greatest portrait
artists of of all time and a great beauty himself. I remember Ingrid Sischy telling us about
her days of going around New York with Robert and saying he would walk into rooms and literally
the conversation would stop he was so strikingly beautiful. So the self-portraits of him capture that beauty and capture that spirit. The one where he's holding the cane was taken not long before he died and that was what appealed to me. He looks like a ghost in that photograph. I was supposed to have my photograph taken, I had a date in the diary but he died two weeks before it and everyone know he was really ill but there's something about his self-portrait, the
one with the devil horns and everything. I love self-portraits anyway by painters and stuff
like that I just love them, but for a photographer – Nan, we talked about Nan earlier on – now Robert, he was
an incredibly wonderful self-portraitist, he gets it. And he's also a little tongue and cheek as well, he's kind of showing the camera like 'look at me, I'm a little devil'. He was little devil. I heard he was a big devil. Just a technical Master, composition just perfect, everything about it, that is what he's known for and when he does it for himself he just knocks it out of the park. All the great artists thought about the composition, they thought about the end product, what was it going to be like? And having had my picture taken by Avedon, I was sitting at the piano and he would come over and just move a finger and it would take 25 minutes before he would take the photograph
and everything had to be in the right place. And work with a bellows camera so it was literally a
single plate with with one shot at a time and you would only shoot seven or eight plates. What is it about the Hustler series that you keep me hunting for more and you keep me hunting for those vintage prints too which I love. For me, and the photographs capture this,
is the vulnerability of the sex worker. The position that those people put themselves in
order to feed themselves to survive. The drama, the sexiness, the red curtain and what's going to happen next? It's a bit like the Nan Goldin thing, in a way, there's so much
atmosphere in the photographs and I love atmosphere in photographs and Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s Hustlers series always have atmosphere. They are very evocative. I find them very sexy, very sad. Yes, it's that moment of sadness. To have to do that to earn a living. And the degradation of it and the shame of it, is captured in all those photographs. And that parallels on a personal level with our philanthropic work because sex workers are disproportionately affected by HIV AIDS and again it's that whole elements of society
where there is shame and stigma and those photographs again I feel they capture that
that powerful juxtaposition. The series is done I believe between 1990 and 1992
in LA, which again no antiretrovirals then, nothing then, you're talking about a hot bed... not knowing
how to deal with the virus, not knowing how to fight it or what's going on and so it really does
exemplify that. To be a sex worker in Los Angeles at that time was very, very dangerous. You’re dicing with death every single moment. Yes, it’s a kiss of death. It could be very dangerous. You're rolling the dice. Again, the power of Photography, just like Nan Goldin to capture that time in that era. You never capture that with painting, no way. I love paintings and I love artwork I collect paintings but for me nothing speaks the
truth more like a photograph – and David Hockney would kill me for saying that but I'm sorry, I'm right.
Speaking about the truth of photography, I think this is actually a perfect time to get into one of the most iconic images of photography which is the Robert Frank Trolley. Postwar America, looking It through the eyes of our Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, who really shaped photography. I love reportage photography for its ability to capture a moment in time and a moment in history. For me, the thing that immediately jumped out was the African-Americans at the back of the trolley –
that division in society, the way they were forced to sit at the back of the bus and how wrong that was but so reflective of that time. Exactly. And then in the middle you've got a woman and Judy Garland as if she's going to Meet Me in St Louis. I mean, hello! You couldn't get a bigger contrast between the middle image and those two at the right. And the composition, again... it's just a moment in time that he got and that is the difference between an average photographer and master. And a master, which is what Frank was. But reportage is such an important thing to both of you – the photojournalism. On a personal note you keep me very much on my toes with articles and photos
that you see online or in or in daily papers or anything like that for me to go and find them.
What is the drive for that? Well, it's just really important for me to have very striking images from very important political things, human things, social things. These people risk their lives day after day to take photographs in dangerous situations so that we can see the truth. so that we can really see what's out there. And there was a lot of backlash with Frank's the Americans, people did not like the way that he was portraying America, this is not how America wanted to be
seen postwar. As a Swiss photographer, it almost took an outsider like Frank to be able to capture this with that level of objectivity because you’re right, people get very emotional in the way their country is portrayed.
