Pictures From An Exhibitionist

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With a collection this big, you get to compare iconic shots like George Hoyningen-Huene's Seated Divers from around 1930--a man and woman seated at the end of a diving board, backs turned to us and peering out at a painted-backdrop sea--with instant classics like one of Rineke Dijkstra's hypnotic pictures of single figures standing upright against the horizon at real beaches around northern Europe. The Hoyningen-Huene is one of the psychic landmarks of fashion photography, a picture in which the clothes matter less than the canny mood, both aerodynamic and dreamy. Dijkstra's shot of a girl presenting herself in the grave light of the North Sea, called simply Kolobrzeg, Poland, July 26, 1992, has nothing to do with fashion and everything to do with how a teenage body can be spindly and awkwardly canted but still have the celestial bearing, the beckoning power of a Renaissance Virgin.

Even if you didn't know that John started buying pictures after he stopped drinking, you might figure it out from the pictures. They suggest the mental climate of a man cleaning up his act. The old John was a circus clown shot out of his own cannon, so you'd expect his collection to have more of the orangutan behavior and chili-pepper colors you get from, say, David La Chappelle, the celebrity photographer who pinwheeled around John three years ago. You do find some of that in the Polaroid self-portraits Lucas Samaras made in the 1970s, when he used to develop the picture, then scribble over it until his face and form became tangled in a vortex of melting candy colors. You find it again in the flagrant comedies of Tracey Moffatt's Something More series, scenes staged for the camera, where bored babes get very fed up with Nowheresville, Australia. At the High's satellite galleries at the Georgia-Pacific Center, where there's a separate show devoted to Elton's celebrity portraits, you see it once more in the shot Andy Warhol took of himself in drag, a Halloween-in-Greenwich Village version of Joan Crawford. Actually, he looks pretty good.

But the prevailing climate of this collection is one of spare, sharp lines, big graphics and crisp edges. John loves Irving Penn, whose work looks clean and sober even when his subject was a New Guinea tribesman caked in ceremonial mud. He loves Robert Mapplethorpe, but without the whips and chains, which means the Mapplethorpe of laser-cut male torsos and tulips that loom before you like stage-lit pachyderms. These pictures were not collected by the inebriated stage floozy we used to know and love. They bear the mark of the studious Sir Elton John, a man buying things in the cold light of the morning after. Even the sex here is stately. Don't look for anything hairy or louche. It's mostly neatly muscled male torsos by Horst, Mapplethorpe or Herb Ritts. The models have abs more tightly organized than Elton's old record collection. Their nipples are neat as a pin.

What's unbuckled, in places, is the melancholy, which may be the emotional default mode of a man who has buried good friends--Gianni Versace, Princess Diana--and lost others to AIDS. The Elton John who wrote Daniel, with its baffled yearning, is the one who loves the blue-tinted male nudes of John Dugdale, with their Victorian grief. The somber undercurrent is plain even in Andres Serrano's vivid crimson circle in a rectangle of bright yellow, which on closer inspection turns out to be a pool of blood.