Music Photographer Says Royal Family Buried His Images of David Bowie and Princess Diana

A photographer has claimed that Kensington Palace buried his images of Princess Diana with David Bowie for almost four decades.

Music photographer Denis O’Regan captured a shot of the late Princess of Wales with Bowie after his Glass Spider Concert in Wembley Stadium in London, U.K. in June 1987.

In an interview with The Telegraph of London, O’Regan, who has shot Bowie more than any other photographer, says that the then 25-year-old Princess Diana had shyly asked him whether the musician would want a picture with her. The photographer responded with: “I think he would.”

But according to O’Regan, the photograph of Princess Diana and Bowie (which was published by The Telegraph) was never seen by the public. O’Regan says that the following day, Kensington Palace asked that the photographer bury his image of Diana with Bowie.

As a result, for almost forty years, the photograph has reportedly not been seen, not because of the identity of the person captured alongside the late Princess of Wales, but because of who was out of frame. Princess Diana had attended the concert with British Army officer James Hewitt. She and Hewitt had an affair from about 1986 to 1991, overlapping with her marriage to the future King Charles. O’Regan claims that Kensington Palace wanted to bury his picture of the princess to not “fuel the fire” about her relationship with Hewitt.

“So the next day, my agent got a call from [the] Palace, saying don’t use the pictures, because word had gone out about James Hewitt,” O’Regan tells the news outlet. “So that’s when it kind of erupted. It was interesting, on a number of levels.”

“They just didn’t want Diana in the press. It was really [that] they didn’t want to fuel the fire.”

O’Regan says that no one in the press or public knew about Hewitt at the time. But the photographer recalls that the Palace appeared to follow a simple rule: the fewer images of Princess Diana at that concert released to the public, the better.

“So the more pictures that weren’t out there, the better, because someone would have said: ‘This is her at the show that she turned up to with James Hewitt, even though I didn’t get the multi-million dollar shot of the two of them together, because no one knew who he was,”

However, one of O’Regan’s pictures of Bowie and Princess Diana will be released in his upcoming photography book David Bowie, which will be published in the U.S. on Aug. 5. The upcoming text from Bowie’s official photographer features pictures from more than 200 of the late star’s concerts.

Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.