With the best will in the world, no biography can claim to be a truly accurate portrait of its subject. Sources are unreliable. Memories of friends or colleagues may be coloured by the Airbrush of Time. Observations and contemporary sources can seldom be objective. There is merit, therefore, in recording a life in photographs, and letting viewers form their own ideas as to what sort of a person is portrayed, and this is especially true when it comes to giants of the entertainment industry. There is always the risk that we read too much into the images. Was Diaghilev as remote and haughty as he appears in the score or so of photographs that we have of him? Did Mickey Rooney really smile all the time? How much pain are we entitled to read into the photograph of Marilyn Monroe announcing the break-up of her marriage to Joe Di Maggio in 1954? Such questions are of course pointless when dealing with the deceased, but may be just as fruitless when dealing with someone still alive.

The life that is the subject of Philip Dodd’s excellent Michael Jackson – A Life in the Spotlight, is that of a singer, songwriter and dancer reckoned by millions to have been the greatest showbiz entertainer of all time. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Jackson wowed the world with a series of singles, albums, videos and concert extravaganzas that have rightly gone down in history. This was Jackson on the rise, climbing higher and faster than anyone else in the business, before or after. Unless something, quite unimaginable at the present, hits the digital processing plants that produce the discs, tapes, and apps that line our shelves and fill our gadgets to reduce them all to the state of ‘not responding’, this is the Jackson that will be remembered long after the scandal and the sadness have been forgotten.

It was an extraordinary life. Michael didn’t have a childhood; he had an apprenticeship. His father, Joe Jackson, was a stern disciplinarian. “My father would rehearse with a belt in his hand, you couldn’t mess up,” Michael recalled, let us assume, accurately. “I was a veteran even before I was a teenager.” At the age of eight, Michael appeared on stage in an amateur night at the Apollo, Harlem. He was good. Two years later, he and his brothers signed with the Motown label, and within a year they had made four singles, all of which had gone to No.1 in the US Charts. Dodd has a happy way with words to portray Michael at this time, describing these early numbers as ‘chirpy bubble gum soul’. The big breakthrough came in October 1972 with the release of Michael’s single “Ben”, the title number from a movie of the same name about a young boy who befriends a rat. Don Black, who wrote the lyrics of “Ben”, was impressed by Michael when he met him, and described the boy as “very sensitive”, which made the life that Michael was required to live all the more difficult. Photographs in the book reveal the chillingly artificial presentation of the Jackson house – more a set for television or the theatre than a family home. Even when the camera shows Michael allegedly having fun, there is an awful posed quality in all that we see: brightly lit; all artefacts looking as though they had just come out of the box and would go straight back into it when the session was over; toys not for the boys, but for the camera. In Michael’s words, “having friends and slumber parties and buddies… there was none of that for me.” His siblings were his only friends, and when they all grew up and went their separate ways, he was on his own.

At the age of seventeen, he left what had passed for home. He learned the art of structuring a song, developed his dancing talent, and made his first movie. This was The Wiz, with Diana Ross playing Dorothy. Michael admitted that he had always had ‘a crush on her’. Michael played the Scarecrow, a confused character with whom he strongly identified. The Wiz bombed and Michael was heartbroken. But luck, in the shape of Quincy Jones was just around the corner. Jones was the composer, music arranger, record executive and father-figure who produced the two albums that made Michael a star – Off the Wall and Out of My Life – and a third album that made him a superstar. Thriller was created in eight weeks to meet the Christmas release date in 1982. It sold a million copies in a single week. The rest was a mixture fame, success, wealth, notoriety and scandal.

This collection of photographs shows it all: the Flower Power-bedecked Jacksons at the London Palladium; a beautiful portrait of Michael in the late 1970s with droplets of water hanging from his hair; on a date with Tatum O’Neal, another victim of a precocious childhood; on the set of Thriller; with Princess Diana at a charity concert; a stunning image of a moment onstage during the Bad tour; and images of Michael with Madonna, Mandela, Liz Taylor, Ritchie, Minnelli, Warhol, McCartney, Clinton, Spears and many more. And there’s a wonderful shot of Michael racing over the cobbled streets of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas while shooting the video for “They Don’t Care About Us”.

Michael Jackson also reveals the darker side of the picture. There is a frightening photograph of Michael on stage with a children’s choir singing “Earth Song”. This was the performance that led to Jarvis Cocker’s protest that Michael was presenting himself as “some kind of Christ-like figure with the power of healing”. A chill air seems to hang over the family shots: with Lisa Marie Presley, his first wife; shopping with his children in Las Vegas; arriving at the Santa Barbara County Courthouse with his father; the terrifying medieval interiors of his Neverland retreat; and the terrible images of Michael holding his eight-month-old baby over the balcony in Berlin. Taken as a whole, the pictures also chart the morphing of Michael’s facial features. In 1983 he was still Michael Jackson; by 1986 he was not so much someone else as something else. It was as though a mask had been fastened on to his head.

In 2008, Michael celebrated his 50th birthday. He spent the day with his three children, watching cartoons on TV. “I feel very wise and sage,” he told an interviewer, “but at the same time very young.” In those fifty years, he had passed rapidly from child prodigy, to squeaky-clean teenage performer, to global superstar, but now he had entered the age of tragic adulthood. The performing would become harder and harder. The body couldn’t go on dancing forever. The voice was already losing its power. The last concert tour, planned but never executed, was going to be 50 concerts in London, impossibly punishing.

Perhaps one of the best descriptions of Michael Jackson, is that supplied by Nancy Reagan, the wife of President Reagan. After her husband had presented Jackson with an award for supporting a campaign against teen drink-driving, she described Jackson as “a boy who looks just like a girl, who whispers when he speaks. Wears a glove on one hand and sunglasses all the time? I don’t know what to make of him”.

Jackson was an enigma, but that is too vague and simplistic a description. In a way, all subjects of biographies are enigmas. We know the details of Jackson’s career; we know little about what he thought and how he felt. Confusion surrounds his life and his death. It may have been the cocktail of drugs that finally killed this strange man; it may have been a combination of factors. Michael was heavily in debt. To all intents and purposes he was living alone. He was wrapped in the cling-film of ugly rumour. It may be that he had lost the will to live.

There’s a couplet in Don Black’s lyric to “Ben” that runs:
If you ever look behind, and don’t like what you find,
There’s something you should know, you’ve got a place to go…
Maybe Jackson felt he had no place to go.

In collaboration with Endeavour London: www.endeavourlondon.com