“Once you’re a celebrity, always a celebrity. You have to face it. You’re a celebrity, you’re fair game in public areas.” – Ron Galella
Celebrities are perfect. At least, this is the intent of various PR teams and studios. A celebrity must maintain an unattainable level of beauty and perfection, whether it is their lifestyle or their physical self. It’s hard work that many people spend their livelihoods maintaining. What if there was a method to strip it all away?
It’s relatively simple, actually. After all, Ron Galella built a career out of borderline criminal photography, and he’s honored for deconstructing celebrities’ lives in his invasive photographs.
To clarify, Ron Galella is a well-known paparazzo who is best known for his work “Windblown Jackie.” This piece portrays Jacqueline Lee “Jackie” Kennedy Onassis walking down the street with her hair being blown in the wind. It is one of the most famous paparazzi photos in the (unofficial) genre. It’s candid and artfully shot. Ron Galella does have a talent for photography, and he portrays that talent in all his work.
However, this does not change the impacts of his kind of work. Ron Galella hunted celebrities down in the gluttonous way that only humans can do, and he did not relent easily once he found his “muse.” Jackie Onassis was harassed consistently by Ron. Even after a restraining order of 25ft was filed, he used a 25 foot measuring tape to get close to Jackie as a “joke.”
His incidents with Jackie are his most infamous, but he has many more stories about getting the “perfect shot” at everyone’s expense. AnOther Magazine had an interview with Ron Galella, and they discussed his memoir Shooting Stars: The Untold Stories of Ron Galella which references that, “he was spat at and punched by Sean Penn; had his tooth knocked out by Richard Burton’s bodyguard; his tires slashed by Elvis Presley’s bodyguards; hosed down by Brigitte Bardot’s security; banned from Studio 54, twice; and caused Elizabeth Taylor to hiss, ‘I’m going to kill Ron Galella!’” and many other various “honors.”
The behavior of Ron Galella and various other paparazzi is perfectly insane. It reflects a dehumanization of celebrities that’s strangely commonplace within our culture, and it perpetuates this narrative in every magazine, art gallery, and article that displays these photographs. It is a primary contributor to our modern disrespect for privacy paraded around on social media. Not only does this continue to happen to celebrities such as Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter (as of recently), but strangers can be caught in the crossfire of influencer videos and harassed all the same.
The act of paparazzi teeters the line of the law very precariously. Many anti paparazzi legislation has been instated due to the gross disrespect of privacy that comes with the profession, but this isn’t a strong enough deterrent for some. The crime of the art does seem to be the cognitive dissonance required to justify its invasive nature. Photographers like Ron Galella believe that they are doing the celebrities a favor by publicizing “authentic beauty.” The justification of these actions ultimately leads to the normalization of stalking and the denial of privacy to citizens, no matter their social status.
Despite the horrors of harassment, there is a certain allure to paparazzi photography that cannot be overlooked. These photographers excel in portraying the “everyday lives” of these celebrities. Audiences are desperate for authenticity, and publications will pay ridiculous amounts to get it. Our appetite for more is never satiated because we seem to have an endless hunger for knowledge. This type of art feeds on “knowing the unknowable” and “discovering the mystery” of a person out of our reach.
However, a celebrity is not a person, but a persona. Once the persona is separated from the stage it was built for, the celebrity (figuratively) ceases to exist. Paparazzi are meant to skirt the line. To give an audience a taste of a celebrity’s inner life and personhood. However, if the photographer reveals too much, the illusion of perfection and mystery is broken. An audience grows bored once all that is left to reveal is the mundane, yet the paparazzi will continue to rip and tear at the persona to get to the person until the celebrity is thoroughly thwarted. The art of paparazzi is the desecration of the persona, and the destruction of the person.
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Your article raises a compelling point about the paparazzi’s role in both feeding and dismantling celebrity culture. Ron Galella’s work, while undeniably artistic at times, shows how the pursuit of “authenticity” often comes at the cost of human decency. The idea that celebrities are “fair game” blurs the line between art and exploitation. It’s honestly quite unsettling, how our endless hunger for “realness” can drive such harmful practices.
Hey Zoe! Your discussion of paparazzi does an excellent job of dissecting both sides of the issue, presenting not just the problems that it creates but the broader issues that make it possible. It would be easy to point fingers at Ron Galella as a stalker but you take on the challenge of providing a more nuanced view, digging deeper until you found how we are all responsible for the destruction of celebrities as well as their creation.