![\"\u00a9](\"http:\/\/mylondondiary.co.uk\/2002\/06\/02-61641.jpg\" "\\"\u00a9")
\nA Michael Jackson fan at Soho protest against Sony, June 2002<\/em><\/p>\n
Not that I personally wished him any harm. I had a great deal of sympathy for the way he was hounded by the press, and certainly wouldn’t wish a heart attack on anyone –\u00a0 having been fortunate enough to recover from one.<\/p>\n
But he was one of the very few celebrities I’ve photographed – it happened by accident, as I was on my way to photograph a demonstration against the use of sweated labour – ‘Give Nike A Red Card’ – at Oxford Circus in June 2002, saw a TV crew running, and followed them.<\/p>\n
Fans were demonstrating against Sony failing to support Jackson’s latest record, and I took a few pictures of them – and eventually put a couple on what was then my new web site, My London Diary – halfway down this page<\/a>. I hung on taking pictures for a bit and then an open-top bus appeared and the fans broke out from behind the barriers and surged around it. Jackson appeared with a large placard, ‘Sony is Phoney’ and a puppet, and pretended he was going to climb down into the sea of fans.<\/p>\n I was shooting with a Leica and probably my normal 35mm lens, rather more interested in the fans’ responses than Jackson himself who appears rather small on the few images I took (and I’ve cropped the two above for the web so he is more visible.)<\/p>\n And when I got the the end of the roll it didn’t seem worth loading another\u00a0 – so I went off to photograph ‘No Sweat’, who after their demo at Oxford Circus set off kicking a football and marching down Oxford St.<\/p>\n It was an interesting day and ended with what was I think the first of a number of curious encounters I’ve had with the Met. After I’d followed the demonstrators to somewhere opposite Selfridges – and by then the police had pushed them onto the pavement – an officer came up to me and very politely said – with a curious little smirk “I think you’ve taken enough pictures now, don’t you Sir<\/em>?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Although I can’t claim a High Court judge’s knowledge of Michael Jackson, he was never more than a vague figure to me, and I find today’s hype ridiculous. The 20th century produced plenty of musical geniuses – Charlie Parker would be my nomination for the No 1 spot – with Jackson not even in the … Continue reading Jacko RIP<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-own-work","category-political-issues"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\u00a9](\"http:\/\/buildingsoflondon.co.uk\/Library\/20020617-34cs.jpg\" "\\"\u00a9")
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