Unseen Photos of David Bowie at His Peak

Premiered at Venice Immersive, a new AR exhibition shares previously unseen images of Bowie on his Serious Moonlight world tour. Photographer Denis O’Regan opens up on his unusually close bond with the late star

If you entered a certain pitch-black room on the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio during this year’s Venice Film Festival, you will have seen the silence and darkness erupt into a barrage of some 800 neon-lit photographs, 360-degree soundscapes and blasting David Bowie tracks. The result of a collaboration between Bowie’s touring photographer Denis O’Regan and L-Acoustics producer Paul Keating, the extended reality installation Bowie: Unseen | Unheard is a time capsule of O’Regan’s friendship with the megastar – a way of “taking advantage of all the technology that’s there to bring this story to people so they can almost live within it”, says O’Regan.

From an archive of a staggering 10,000 images, O’Regan whittled down the selection, including never before seen photos of Bowie. Split across eight screens to the front and periphery of participants, the pictures chart their adventures on the 1983 Serious Moonlight Tour, from Australia to Singapore. Many of O’Regan’s photographs have been published in the books Ricochet: David Bowie 1983 and David Bowie by Denis O’Regan, but the installation is testament to the uniqueness of the musician and photographer’s relationship. Though O’Regan had already toured with the likes of The Rolling Stones by that point, he developed an especially close bond with Bowie.

“I thought he would want to keep me at arm’s length, [me] being a photographer and him being him,” O’Regan reflects. “But it was the opposite. He became very involved in it. I went on the tour because I proposed a book, so he wanted to ensure the book was as good as possible. He wanted as many pictures as possible, so it became the opposite of what I thought.”

Unlike with bands like Duran Duran or Queen, O’Regan explains that he had a much stronger solo relationship with Bowie – whom he has snapped more than any other photographer. “[Band members] spend a lot of time together, and there’s also jealousy [for me] to be photographing one more than another,” he says. “But with him, all my effort was concentrated on him, and then his on me.” He recalls the tour’s closing night party where the team summed up the experience by awarding the best hotels, worst food and the like: “The catchphrase of the tour was [picked] by David Bowie. It was, ‘Where’s Denis?’”

Sound designer Nick Ryan and visual designer Joe Crossley set O’Regan’s photos to Bowie’s music – “not normally allowed for a documentary”, O’Regan says. Audio of the photographer’s own recollections is also interwoven into the clamouring soundscape, booming through 80 speakers. “Nick recorded me when I didn’t realise,” explains O’Regan, “and then a lot of it was built on top of that.”

While many of the best photos featured are onstage, it’s the backstage shots that are perhaps the most striking, carrying a sense of unexpected intimacy with the musician. One particular photo shows Bowie lying face-up on the tip of a narrowboat in Thailand. “David hadn’t been to Thailand, and neither had I,” says O’Regan. “It was really good fun to bring that to the screen because we were out and about so much, whereas on the main part of the tour we weren’t. It’s the old story of hotel venue, hotel plane, all the rest of it.”

O’Regan sorted through the images with the help of Bowie’s New York assistant; they hadn’t seen many of them in over 40 years. “Both of us knew what he was basically thinking in some of those images,” O’Regan insists. “I said, ‘It’s so funny, other people wouldn’t notice, but he looks a bit annoyed in that picture. He’s not as happy as he could be in that image and I just captured it.’”

Rifling through these old memories also brought back mixed emotions about the tour and the sense of loss brought by Bowie’s death in 2016 – feelings that would be present “if you were to go through pictures of anyone that isn’t around any more”, says O’Regan. The installation coincides with what would have been Bowie’s 80th birthday. “It’s a bit more difficult to be objective when you look at so many pictures of a person you [knew],” he adds.

During the tour, in which Bowie was performing to crowds of up to 60,000 a night, O’Regan’s relationship with the singer strayed well beyond that of photographer and subject. He began dating the make-up artist on the tour, and would go on double dates with Bowie and his girlfriend at the time. “I’m telling you all about my love life here,” O’Regan laughs. “There was sort of a shared life in a weird way. There were only three people who were English [on tour], including David. So there was that little bond as well, and he was very English and very down to earth.”

Bowie: Unseen | Unheard is a fitting tribute to a stellar artist, both onstage and off. O’Regan managed to see it in Venice three times: “It was fun to stand at the back and just see people looking around at the screens, which is quite hard work, really, when the images are coming at you left and right,” he jokes. He hopes visitors will see another side to Bowie: “He wasn’t a rock star when he wasn’t on stage, and he liked being quite normal.”