Paparazzi sing the blues
“In St-Tropez it’s all over for the paparazzi!” It’s the least likely headline you could imagine, coming at the end of a season of unofficial holiday snaps from the celebrity-infested former fisherman’s port.
Over the summer, we’ve been fed images of Uma (Thurman) and Arki (Busson) tenderly sharing a cigarette aboard their mega-yacht, and Woody Allen doing his trademark busy shuffle along the port with wife Soon-Yi.
And, of course, we’ve all enjoyed pictures of Simon Cowell and his pregnant girlfriend, Lauren Silverman, engaging in displays of amorous behaviour in the town’s streets, cafés and public beaches that would make a teenager blush.
So it isn’t a dearth of celebrities that’s the cause for what Nice Matin calls “the paparazzi blues.” No, says Jean-Michel Psaila, head of Abaca, one of the biggest photo agencies in France, the reasons the paparazzi are abandoning St-Tropez are rather more complex.
First there was the tightening of French privacy laws after the Duchess of Cambridge was snapped sunbathing topless last year (the photographer was arrested and charged, along with the editor of the magazine that published the photos).
Then celebrities started doing the paparazzis’ job for them, tweeting and Instagramming every intimate detail. So there’s not much point in the malodorous hordes of Nikonwielders crouching in the sand for hours outside Club 55 in the Mediterranean heat.
That’s especially true since, Psaila says, most “paparazzi” photos now are deliberate setups, taken with the subject’s full knowledge. American celebrities, he says, play the game better than others. “They take on board the fact that they came to St-Tropez to show off. They play a ‘look at me’ game with the photographers.”
But however happy the British and U.S. public are to drink in these meticulously choreographed publicity shots, nothing gets our voyeur- istic juices going quite like a stolen snap of an A-list muffin top, a bad hair day or a telltale constellation of post-Botox needlemarks along a hairline.
The lesson? That we should gorge on these images while we can. In St-Tropez and elsewhere, through social networks and their self-indulgent chatter, celebrities are flooding the market with shots of their buttock tattoos, pregnant stomachs and gold “tooth grilles,” deliberately devaluing the paparazzi currency.
One would hope that ultimately, they’re devaluing their own currency too, but sadly, the opposite is more likely to be true.
They may be in their death throes now but, a few years after the paparazzis’ demise, it’s possible that this accursed breed might be viewed differently.
A snap of the shaven-headed Britney Spears attacking a photographer’s car with a green umbrella could be viewed in the same rose-tinted light as Grace Kelly’s famous dockside picture in Cannes.
The stolen shot of Jackie O sauntering down Madison Ave. might be given the same documentary significance as a crude photo of Kate Moss leaving a soirée with white powder around one nostril. By that stage, we’ll almost certainly be getting all our frissons of unauthorized access from that imperishable strain of paparazzi progeny: the cameraphone-toting public.