There’s only a little over a week left if you wish to see the Elton John/David Furnish photographic exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in Kensington. As you can see from the photo on the home page, which itself is by Robert Mapplethorpe, it is called Fragile Beauty. Featuring 300 works by 140 different artists, these photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection present an extraordinary spectacle.

There are stunning black and white photos of some iconic moments in American history: the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in Los Angeles in 1968; Tommie Smith and John Carlos giving the black power salute on the Olympic medal podium on Mexico City four months later; the slaughter of four students at Kent State University in 1970, which inspired the memorable song Ohio by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young:
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio

There a range of dazzling-looking women to inspect, from Marlyn Monroe to Miss Piggy, and a similar display of men. Perhaps above all the show captures so many elements that are at the heart of humanity: sex and sadness, delight and despair, friendship and feuding, life and death. One of the latter is the appalling, horribly mesmerising, image of one of the plummeting bodies forlornly escaping the calamity of the World Trade Center in New York in September 2001.

It goes without saying that Elton John is a very wealthy man. By putting this section of images on public display, he shows us a little bit of himself, too.

Happy New Year!