Elton John famously collects eccentric eyewear. He is less widely known as a collector of photography — and yet the singer-songwriter owns close to 8,000 pieces dating from 1910 to the present.

Highlights from that collection are now being shown here at Tate Modern. For the next six months (through May 7), “The Radical Eye” presents 191 works from the 1920s to the 1950s by a hit parade of photographers including André Kertesz, Edward Steichen, Man Ray, Irving Penn and Dorothea Lange. (Parts of the collection have been shown at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in 2000-1 and at the Pinchuk Art Centre in Ukraine in 2007.)

Mr. John and David Furnish, his husband and the collection’s co-owner, are in talks with Tate over which works they will make available to the national collections as a “gift or promised gift,” said Simon Baker, senior curator of photography at Tate Modern.

Image A “corner portrait” of Salvador Dalí by Irving Penn. Credit... The Irving Penn Foundation

“This is undoubtedly one of the world’s most important collections of photography,” said Phillip Prodger, head of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, who is not involved in the exhibition. “It contains many of the very finest examples of the most famous photographs in the world, particularly in that modern period between the wars.”