Celebrity photographer who stalked Jacqueline Onassis
Ron Galella 1931-2022
“My idea of a good picture is one that’s in focus and of a famous person doing something unfamous,” wrote Andy Warhol in 1979. “It’s being in the right place at the wrong time. That’s why my favourite photographer is Ron Galella.” Galella, who has died aged 91, was known as the godfather of American paparazzi. He photographed Warhol many times, along with countless other public figures, from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Robert Redford to Mick Jagger, Tom Cruise and Paris Hilton. Yet he was most closely associated with Jacqueline Onassis, said The New Yorker, whom he stalked so relentlessly in the 1970s that she took out a restraining order against him. She was, he admitted, his “obsession”.
Galella’s methods were controversial, and in many ways, he anticipated the generation of ruthless celebrity photographers who would pursue the likes of Diana, Princess of Wales and Britney Spears. Yet his “determination to capture the natural, unpremeditated aspects of his subjects made his work pulse with a startling sense of life”; and several of his pictures are now in fine art collections. “The point of taking a photograph, for me, is to capture a feeling,” he said. “Henri Cartier-Bresson talked about the decisive moment, and that is what I have tried to capture my whole career.”
Galella was born in the Bronx in 1931 to Italian immigrant parents. His father made coffins and pianos; his mother was a dressmaker. It was while serving in the US air force in Korea that he started taking photographs; later, he used the GI Bill to study photojournalism at an art school in Los Angeles. In the late 1950s, he started taking pictures of film stars at movie premieres, and selling them to magazines. Then he had the idea of following celebrities to parties and galas.
In his efforts to catch them off their guard, he would jump out from behind bushes, and snap them leaning out of taxi windows. On one occasion, he so pestered Marlon Brando that the actor punched him in the face, breaking his jaw (after that, Galella put on a helmet before approaching him). Yet his work did much to illuminate America’s love-hate relationship with fame, said The New York Times, and some celebrities admired it. In the foreword to one of his many books, Diane Keaton argued that he was the photographer who best captured the fleeting beauty and sheer magnetism of that era’s Hollywood stars. “In Galella’s photographs,” she wrote, “Marlon Brando is still the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.”