Fragile Beauty presents a selection of contemporary photographs from the collection of Sir Elton John and David Furnish at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Featuring over 300 works from 1950 to the present, the exhibition explores a diverse set of themes – from fashion and celebrity to photojournalism and abstraction.
The exhibition’s entrance is enveloped in a large-format typographic intervention, set in a bespoke serif typeface. Its atypical serif placements play on the idea of fragility and traditional notions of beauty. Room titles throughout the exhibition are set in the same custom serif, screen-printed directly to the wall to further emphasise their monumentality. Captions are printed onto thin wooden substrates that are stained to reveal the wood grain underneath, imbuing the graphics with a sense of warmth that is befitting for an exhibition shaped by the personal tastes of its collectors.
Photographers include Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Nan Goldin, Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman and Tyler Mitchell.
Body text throughout is set in APFEL Type Foundry’s Friedel, a sans serif typeface rooted in the mid-1960s – an era from which many of the photographs on show originate.
Photography: Thomas Adank.
Accompanying the V&A exhibition of the same name, Fragile Beauty presents a rich selection of contemporary photography from the collection of Sir Elton John and David Furnish. The cover presents a full-bleed and immersive detail of Robert Mapplethorpe’s Poppy (1988) – the work’s bold colours are complemented by elegant serif typography, screen-printed in a vivid yellow above the image, reminiscent of a magazine masthead.
Page layouts are immersive and editorial, subverted by an unusual folio placement that acts as an anchor for texts and images. Thematic groupings of photographs mirror the exhibition’s flow, each marked with a vividly coloured divider page, featuring a custom headline typeface with atypical serifs that play on the idea of fragility and traditional notions of beauty. This is accompanied by a sans serif rooted in the mid-1960s America – an era from which many of the photographs on show originate.
Photography: Ed Park.
