Ron Galella dies at the age of 91
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, New Jersey. He was 91.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said Geoffrey Croft, a family spokesperson who edited Galella’s most recent book, “100 Iconic Photographs —: A Retrospective.”
Galella was called a creep, a stalker and worse when he began shooting pictures of celebrities in the 1960s, before mass circulation magazines such as People and Us made the presence of paparazzi such as him ubiquitous — and a full generation before phone cameras and websites such as TMZ made celebrity stalking the pastime of legions.
For photographing superstars in the late ’60s 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 owns as many as five Galellas.
His pictures, most in black and white, came to be admired for their composition, insight and energy, which sometimes mimicked the kinetics of combat photography. In a 2010 article in T, the New York Times magazine, Galella’s signature style of close-up action photography was described as “intimate and aggressive at the same time.”
Bribing door attendants, limo drivers and maids in order to position himself where no one expected him to be, Galella would often spring on his prey from hiding places in shrubbery or idling parked cars — not to frighten, he maintained, but to capture something beyond the carapace of their celebrity.
“Expressions on the human face are much more infinite when the person is caught unawares,” he said. He never used a viewfinder — the better to make eye contact. “You are looking at them person to person,” he said. “That is greater than the subject looking at the camera, which is a machine.”
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 ’80s, 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.