David Modell

I began photographing almost instinctively, on the morning that her death was announced. On hearing the reports I went directly to Kensington Palace, where at 8.00 am people had already started gathering and laying flowers.

It was here that myself and other photographers began to encounter hostility and even agression from the members of the public who had come to mourn. It seemed that the tone had already been set - the press and more specifically photographers were being blamed for her death. The usually sober BBC had been reporting all morning that Diana has been killed in a car crash and at the time “she was being chased by photographers.”

Working openly as a photojournalist was almost impossible. Photographers were being identified and removed from the grounds around Kensington Palace, which were now teaming with people arriving with bunches of flowers to lay at the gates. The only alternative was to appear to be a mourner and to work with one small camera; and this became the way in which I worked for the whole of the week.

Having lived in London all my life I have never encountered anything which compares to the extraordinary scenes I saw the week following her death. There seemed to be a kind of national hysteria which I found somewhat bizarre and even depressing. I felt that it was important to simply document the national response to this woman’s death. A woman that hardly anybody knew personally but millions of people felt that they had a relationship with.

It is here that you find the greatest contradiction in the attitude of the public to the photographers. People were genuinely distraught at the death of Diana because they felt as though they knew her. And this was because photographers brought back pictures of her that filled, and sold, newspapers day after day.

In retrospect, when I try to rationalise the irrational collective response to her death, the best I can come up with is that the public felt, in some way, responsible for her death. Their unceasing interest in her life was partly what ended it.

David Modell, May 1998