I have been a Bowie fan since the 1975 reissue of Space Oddity. I bought the records on vinyl, then on CD, then as downloads. I bought the books. I bought the art. I saw him live more than once. My musical tastes shifted across decades the way everybody's do, but Bowie was the constant — the artist who was always already there, before whatever I happened to be listening to that year. When he died in January 2016 it knocked me sideways in a way I had not anticipated and could not entirely justify. I had never met the man. He had no idea I existed. And I was, briefly, properly bereaved.

After his death the auction of his personal art collection went up at Sotheby's, and among the modern British work — the Auerbachs, the Frank Auerbachs, the Tintorettos he'd collected with real seriousness — there was sculpture. There was Henry Moore. Bowie had owned Moore. That detail mattered to me, because I had spent a working life photographing public sculpture in the UK, and a few years before all this the Henry Moore Foundation had asked me, on the strength of work I'd done at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, to come down to Perry Green and photograph the collection. The light that day was perfect. The pictures were among the best I'd taken. I never handed them over. The people running the place struck me as functionaries living off the trust Moore had left behind, with little visible feeling for the work, and I forfeited the fee and kept the photographs. I have no regrets about that.