How Ron Galella, the ‘Godfather’ of Paparazzi, Captured Celebrity in a Flash

“I consider myself a great photographer,” Ron Galella told Town and Country in 2019. “The greatest living photographer now,” he said, then thought a little more. “The most famous. Google who’s the best. They’ll say Ron Galella. I mean Avedon and Irving Penn were great photographers. But they’re dead.”

And now, so is Galella. The king of modern paparazzi photography has died, aged 91, of congestive heart failure. He is famed for his images of so many boldface names, including Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Madonna, Grace Jones, Donald Trump, Dustin Hoffman, Linda Evangelista, Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, Elvis Presley, Ali McGraw, and so many more—celebrities posing, playing, and swirling in a very different era, as filtered and understood pre-internet.

The announcement of Gallela’s passing—he died on Saturday at home in Montville, New Jersey—came, in a quirk of timing, on the day of the Met Gala, the one beautiful-people event Galella would still photograph long past retirement age. He oversaw the publication of over 20 books of his work; Town and Country said he, and those employed by him, had taken over 3 million images since 1952. Newsweek once called him the “paparazzo extraordinaire”; Time and Vanity Fair “the godfather of US paparazzi culture.”

Tabloid images of celebrities—looking glamorous, rushing hither and thither—were Galella’s speciality, as he photographed them night and day, going about their errands and all dressed up, ready to party, or, like Bette Davis, on her way to lunch. He was unapologetically in their faces; in his gaze, they felt in motion, close up, not posed and safely at a distance.

In the Town and Country interview, Galella proudly celebrated his work, and denied accusations made by some of his subjects and critics that his mode of photographing celebrities amounted to stalking and harassment, and extremely distressing. Others were flattered, and played up to his roving, intrusive lens.

Marlon Brandon punched Gallela, who was pursuing him in New York’s Chinatown, in 1973, breaking his jaw. Jackie Onassis took him to court over his pursuit of her, leading to a judge ordering Galella to stay 25 feet away from her. He violated the order and was later threatened with jail, after which he never took another photo of Onassis again.

“Smash his camera,” Onassis once said, after Galella had photographed her with her then-young son John F. Kennedy Jr. Her words became the name of a 2010 documentary about him. “Why did I have an obsession with Jackie? I’ve analyzed it,” Galella told its makers. “I had no girlfriend. She was my girlfriend, in a way.” Galella maintained to Town and Country that Onassis liked to be pursued.

Onassis felt very differently. As conveyed in court testimony, Gallela’s pursuit of her and her children left her feeling “extremely agitated, upset, desperate…” One of her secret service agents told Town and Country that Onassis found Galella ‘repugnant” and “detested” him and his relentless intrusion. The death of Princess Diana in Paris in 1997, in a car being pursued by paparazzi, stripped its practitioners of any glamour they once had.

Etheleen Staley, who first showed Galella’s work at her Staley-Wise Gallery in 2008, told Town and Country, “I think Ron’s a guy that had no moral compass. He didn’t see anything wrong with pursuing somebody, hounding somebody, not being respectful of a person’s privacy. It just didn’t go into his head that you shouldn’t do that. I think that’s the secret of his success, that the boundaries that a lot of people feel didn’t occur to him.”

Time burnishes all, and so now Galella’s mostly black-and-white images look like classy artefacts of another time; there is a glamor to his pictures, a nostalgic bell of Studio 54-ish times of hedonism, where stardom was prized and the aura of celebrity more fixed than the slipstream of louder pretenders that have come to occupy its more porous echelons today. Later in his life, Galella became a celebrity himself, finally venerated by a world he had set out to document; he told WWD in 2014 that he made money by selling the gallery prints of his work.

“Today, the celebrities have changed, they’re more aware of the cameras,” Galella told WWD. “I like stars being themselves instead of posing where you get a phony expression.” Instead, captured by Galella, celebrities were caught in transit, or in the dash of life and mischief. Even now, long past, the photographs feel in a perennially clamorous, very fresh present tense. Tim Teeman; photo gallery by Kelly Caminero.