Mo echoed something in her post about the magical vision of Michael that I think about a lot as a photographer, editor, generally as someone who exists “on the other side of the camera.” As a creative / designer, you tend to dissect the ordinary things that most people take for granted - the way a persimmon fits into your hand, the colour scheme of the Malibu coast as the sun sets, all sorts of other cliché shit… Most of the time I identify music more with its producers than artists because ultimately they craft the output, and music videos and photography the same - A song is unmistakably Barry Gordy, Rick Rubins, Linda Perry, Phil Spector, Mark Ronson, whoever, regardless of who’s laying down the vocals, just as so many photographers - Terry Richardson, Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton, David La Chapelle - can make even the most larger-than-life celebrities / personalities almost props, objects that merely exist in a greater composition.

And that’s what MJ was his entire life - a prop, a marionette for others - his father, his record company, his fans, the industry, the media - and of all the grandiose rhetoric explaining the man and his career, whether in the past few days or the past few decades, the one thing I’ve never heard him described as is powerful.  So when I see a Michael Jackson video, I see the work of some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century - Mark Romanek, Martin Scorsese, Herb Ritts, Matthew Rolston - it’s genius and it’s visceral, and it brings people together - but those visionaries would just have great ideas without Michael there to bring them to life.  Like when Terry Richardson is shooting Lindsay Lohan or Barack Obama, it’s uniquely Terry… but it’s more, the product isn’t just a harshly revealing frame, its the relationship of the artist with a subject.  There’s honor in that, in the relationship between Michael other artists but more in the relationship between him and his audience, in his dedication to his craft - he was an entertainer, and when you see his videos, his performaces, when you’re in a club and the DJ breaks into a MJ track - it engages people in a way that’s indescribable. He was the Jackie Robinson of MTV, and that’s something we take for granted now, but he changed everything we know about music, about music videos, but through that he also changed the perception of African Americans worldwide - his art transcended language and race and the songs and the videos were just tools for something greater.

So yes, MJ gets the fame and the spotlight, but along with it a life he lived for everyone else, the life that made and destroyed him. I’m a control freak, for now I’m happy to live behind the camera, where power and vision supersede celebrity.