PHOTOGRAPHER KNOWN BEST FOR DOGGEDLY PURSUING CELEBRITIES
Ron Galella, the freelance photographer who relentlessly pursued Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis until a judge barred him from taking her picture; who pestered Marlon Brando until Brando broke his jaw; and who, for better or worse, helped define today’s boundary-challenged culture of celebrity, died Saturday at his home in Montville, N.J. He was 91.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said Geoffrey Croft, a family spokesperson.
Galella was called a creep, a stalker and worse when he began shooting pictures of celebrities in the 1960s, before magazines such as People and Us made the presence of paparazzi such as him ubiquitous — and a generation before phone cameras and websites such as TMZ made celebrity stalking the pastime of legions.
For photographing superstars in the late 1960s without permission, a judge called Galella the most flagrant of the “two-bit chiselers and fixers” who sold such pictures for money. Starlets spit at him. Security men throttled him.
But the thick-skinned Galella lived to see his work widely esteemed: displayed in trendy galleries, compared to the photography of Diane Arbus and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and purchased by collectors and museums as exemplars of stargazer art. The Museum of Modern Art in New York owns as many as five Galellas.
Whether his means justified his ends was another question, raised loudly and often by many of his subjects, most prominently Onassis.
The former first lady waged a running court battle with him throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, testifying in a court hearing that he had made her life “intolerable, almost unlivable, with his constant surveillance.” Galella, in turn, claimed the right to earn a living by taking pictures of famous people in public places.
In 1972, a judge ordered him to keep 25 feet away from Onassis and 30 feet away from her children. A decade later, facing jail time for violating the order — hundreds of times — Galella agreed never to take another picture of them. And he never did.
Ronald Edward Galella was born Jan. 10, 1931, one of five children of Vincenzo and Michelina (Marinaccio) Galella, and grew up in the Bronx.
After serving as a photographer in the Air Force during the Korean War, Galella studied photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
He married Betty Lou Burke in 1979, and she became his business partner. She died in 2017.