Pictures From An Exhibitionist

One thing being a rock star gets you is an apartment the size of the Pentagon. O.K., not the Pentagon. Elton John's place in Atlanta is only 18,000 sq. ft., about the size of everything you and all your friends live in put together. But that's still a lot of wall space, which you need if you're Elton John. Ten years ago, around the time he established his U.S. foothold in Atlanta (he also has houses in London and Nice and one of those rolling country estates in Old Windsor, England), Sir Elton, as he is properly called, also discovered photographs. Several million dollars and much shopping later, he has one of the larger private collections in the world.

One other thing stardom gets you is a genuine art-world institution to show your little treasures, or 380 of them, which is what the High Museum of Art in Atlanta is doing with John's photographs, until Jan. 28. However much exhibits like this may be a public service, they are also a venerable form of donor courtship. It's fair to say that the trustees of the High wouldn't mind if Sir Elton were to will them every bit of this collection someday. (They must hold their breath every time he tells the press how much he would love to see a photography museum established in London.) But if they covet his holdings, who can blame them? This is a collection few museums could just go out and buy. Auction and gallery prices for photos have been rising steeply, in part because of buyers like John. Seven years ago, he bid up the price of Glass Tears, Man Ray's landmark caprice from 1932, to $190,000, then a record for any photograph bought at auction. His collection is more than 2,000 prints and climbing. And it's not bad.

Scratch a collector, and you find a pack rat who likes to play librarian. As a teenager Elton bought rock records extravagantly, then organized them with Prussian efficiency, filing them by record label and catalog number. With early stardom he loaded up on the usual blunder acquisitions of new-money collectors. (What was it exactly that baby boomers saw in Art Nouveau posters and Tiffany lamps?) Most of that he sold off some years ago in the mental and physical housecleaning that accompanied his decision to stop drinking. Then he went to lunch in France, somebody showed him some prints by Horst, and he was off and running.

Like most collections, this one amounts to a fan's notes, not an encyclopedic survey. It contains almost nothing from the 19th century, and the 20th century inventory is light on landscape and street photography, heavy on fashion and portraiture. But it's a highly credible assortment, brainy and fun, with samples from most of the major episodes of 20th century photography. There's a fair selection of greatest hits--Edward Steichen's 1924 portrait of Gloria Swanson behind a scrim of black lace, Dorothea Lange's inevitable Migrant Mother of 1936--and some less familiar examples by big names. Everybody has seen Edward Weston's nudes, but probably not the one here, from 1927, which turns a pair of legs, tightly folded at the knees, into nestled loaves of Italian bread.