Paparazzi pioneer stalked Jackie Onassis and was beaten up by Marlon Brando
In his relentless hounding of the rich and famous, those whom Ron Galella captured with his camera were not so much subjects as targets. Galella, who has died aged 91, was a pioneer of the now ubiquitous paparazzi culture, his stock-in-trade was the photograph that caught a celebrity off-guard and subverted what he derided as ‘‘the scripted pictures the agencies and film studios wanted you to see’’.
To get his candid and unrehearsed pictures required a mix of resourcefulness and low cunning. Chauffeurs and maids were bribed to tip him off about the movements of the celebrity he was stalking so that he could catch them unexpectedly, often springing on his unsuspecting prey from a hiding place in a bush or car park.
When shooting he never used a viewfinder and held his camera to his chest, pre-focused at 1.83m and set at F8 so that he could interact with his target eye to eye. ‘‘You are looking at them person to person,’’ he said in a 2010 interview. ‘‘That is greater than the subject looking at the camera, which is a machine.’’
It was an up-close-and-personal style that uneasily combined intimacy and aggression and, as The Hollywood Reporter put it, many of those he shot in this fashion ‘‘brandished a middle finger at him’’. Some did considerably more than that and after he had been stalking Marlon Brando all day, the actor gave him a punch that knocked out five teeth and broke his jaw. He received US$40,000 in damages and continued to pursue Brando for pictures, wearing a grid-iron football helmet for protection.
Another with whom he clashed and pursued was Richard Burton, once spending an entire weekend holed up in a rat-infested warehouse overlooking a mooring on the River Thames in the hope of capturing photos of Burton and Elizabeth Taylor boarding their yacht. He had bribed the caretaker to lock him inside with his camera, a bag of food, lavatory paper and a sleeping bag.
Burton’s patience finally snapped when Galella pursued him to Mexico, where the actor’s bodyguards delivered a beating and then had him thrown in jail for harassment.
A 2010 documentary film about the photographer was titled Smash His Camera, which was exactly what many of his victims wanted to do. The title was taken from an instruction Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis gave her Secret Service officers one day in 1972 when Galella was stalking her and her son John Jr while they were cycling in New York’s Central Park.
He managed to save his camera from destruction but she took him to court to secure a restraining order, complaining that he had made her life ‘‘intolerable, almost unliveable, with his constant surveillance’’.
He countered that he had the right to earn a living by taking pictures of anyone he liked when they were in a public place but the judge told him he had overstepped a line and called him the most flagrant of ‘‘two-bit chisellers and fixers’’. He was ordered to stay a minimum of 7.6 metres away from Onassis and 9m away from her children. He mocked the ruling by carrying a huge measuring tape around with him and kept snapping pictures of Onassis and her family for another decade.
He made no apology for his harassment and even employed another photographer to take pictures of him pursuing Onassis around New York. He was only stopped by another court case in 1982 when he was told that if he did not desist he faced a sevenyear jail sentence for repeated violations of the earlier order. He agreed in return for being let off with a $10,000 fine.
He took thousands of pictures of her against her wishes and many were anthologised in his 1974 book Jacqueline.
He later published a second book of photographs in 2012 titled Jackie: My Obsession. Despite his controversial relationship with his subject, prints of his pictures of her are now part of the collection at the JFK Library in Boston.
Much as one disapproved of his intrusive methods, the results were often spectacular and his photographs not only graced the covers of newspapers and magazines such as Time, Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and The New York Times but hung in museums and galleries around the world, from MoMAto Tate Modern.
Nor did all of his subjects give him the finger. Andy Warhol called him his ‘‘favourite photographer’’. Galella responded that he and the celebrity-obsessed Warhol suffered from the ‘‘same social disease’’.
‘‘I just had a passion to photograph. Shoot, shoot, shoot. I just did it and loved it and did it my way.’’
Among the most exhibited of his photographs was a shot of Onassis popularly known as ‘‘Windblown Jackie’’, which he took from a yellow cab when following her one day in 1971.
As she was walking in New York, he stuck his camera out of the window of the cab, and as she turned to look at him a gust of wind blew a veil of her brown hair across her face. He called the picture his Mona Lisa and there were indeed layers of complexity in her enigmatic look that seems halfway between a smile and exasperation.
Although he was seen as the godfather of modern paparazzi practices, he rejected the p-word as a description of his work. ‘‘To me, if you catch celebrities being themselves, that means something. It’s photojournalism,’’ he said in 2007.
He had no children and his wife and one-time editor, Betty Lou Burke, died in 2017.
Ronald Edward Galella was born in New York and grew up in the Bronx, one of five children of Michelina and Vincenzo Galella. His father was a cabinet maker who built grand pianos for Steinway and coffins for the National Casket Company. His mother was a dressmaker and a movie fan, naming her son after her favourite actor, Ronald Colman.
By the time Galella put his camera down, his portfolio covered everyone from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Diana, Princess of Wales, to Elvis Presley, David Bowie, Muhammad Ali and Sophia Loren.
‘‘I just had a passion to photograph. Shoot, shoot, shoot. I just did it and loved it and did it my way,’’ he said. ‘‘You had the satisfaction of shooting the picture. You develop it, you have it in your hands, and it gives you another psychic reward. Then you see it published - that’s another reward. Then you get the cheque. That’s the final reward.’’
Before he died he composed his own obituary for publication on his website and concluded it with typically brazen paparazzi determination. ‘‘PS. If I’m not invited into the pearly gates of heaven, I just might try sneaking in.’’ -