(In 1981, she returned to court, claiming that he should be cited for contempt for not abiding by the ruling.) Galella’s style was controversial, but, in many ways, he anticipated the relentlessness of the photographers who came after him, from the paparazzi who stalked Princess Diana and Britney Spears to those who have more recently been hounding the young stars of TikTok. (Many of these photos are collected in a book appropriately titled “ Jackie: My Obsession.”) As the Washington Post reported, “He jostled her, hit her with his camera strap to provoke a reaction, and circled her in a power boat while she was swimming.” In 1972, Onassis successfully claimed in court that Galella’s techniques constituted harassment, and was able to receive an injunction barring the photographer from coming within twenty-five feet of her. (Galella then created a diptych consisting of one shot of Brando and another of himself, bruised.) But he will perhaps be best remembered for the pictures he took of Onassis, whom he stalked and photographed thousands of times over the course of the nineteen-seventies, often on the streets of New York City. In 1973, Brando, sick of being hounded by Galella on the street, famously punched the photographer and broke his jaw. He was often invasive, arousing the ire of many of his subjects. Galella’s tactics could be extreme: in 2015, he told Vanity Fair that, in order to get shots of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton carrying on aboard a boat on the Thames, he spent a weekend camped out in an empty warehouse on the river’s banks. In the nineteen-sixties, he began his career as a professional paparazzo, selling his pictures to publications such as the National Enquirer, Time, and Life. In the course of his long and extremely prolific career, he shot many of the defining personalities of his age: from Robert Redford and Marlon Brando to Brad Pitt and Truman Capote from Grace Jones and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to Courtney Love and Paris Hilton.īorn to an Italian American family, Galella grew up in the Bronx and served in the Korean War as an Air Force photographer. But, over the last half century, the ever-deepening public interest in the life styles of the rich and famous, which Galella, not unlike Warhol himself, both responded to and helped fuel, provided the photographer with a seemingly endless supply of well-known figures to capture. Warhol, whose picture Galella took again and again throughout the nineteen-seventies and eighties, was one of the photographer’s perennial subjects. That’s why my favorite photographer is Ron Galella.” Galella, who died on April 30th, at the age of ninety-one, was perhaps America’s best-known paparazzo, capturing the daily lives of celebrities, whether they liked it or not. “It’s being in the right place at the wrong time. “My idea of a good picture is one that’s in focus and of a famous person doing something unfamous,” the artist Andy Warhol wrote, in 1979.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |