Paparazzi (eBook)

Media Practices and Celebrity Culture

Kim McNamara (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2015
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
978-0-7456-9808-3 (ISBN)

Infos

Paparazzi photography has emerged as a key element in today's media landscape. This book charts the historical and cultural significance of the industry, profiles its protagonists and discusses how its imagery of celebrity have become a major part of media consumption.
Kim McNamara examines the various ways in which the controversial paparazzi industry is structured, including its workforce practices, development of image markets, and how it has been reconfigured during the transition from analogue paper-based photography to digital platforms. It adds to the literature on celebrity studies, unraveling the importance of the paparazzi to celebrities, and the integral nature of images - both spontaneous and staged to public relations and marketing content.
Based on interviews worldwide with key industry players, including agency managers, photo editors and photographers, from Los Angeles to London, the book argues that the paparazzi should be given central importance in any analysis of media culture.

Kim McNamara is an independent media researcher based in Sydney

Inhalt

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1. Paparazzi: A Genealogy

2. Paparazzi and Media Practices

3. Agencies and Image Markets

4. Paparazzi and Celebrity News

5. Paparazzi and Photographic Genres

6. Celebrities, Photography, and Privacy

Conclusions

References

Rezensionen

"Kim McNamara has written an excellent and most useful book. Drawing on a rich vein of information from her industry research as well as from the academic literature, McNamara?s Paparazzi is indispensable for anyone wanting to properly understand the contemporary production and circulation of celebrity."
Graeme Turner, University of Queensland

"In this fascinating and important study Kim McNamara takes issue with the familiar image of the paparazzi as the invasive hooligans of contemporary journalism. Drawing on first hand research in LA, London and Sydney, she explores the working lives of the paparazzi, the structure of the industry, and the way in which social media are transforming celebrity photography. A fresh, insightful and readable book that has much to teach us about news organisations today - highly recommended."
Rosalind Gill, City University London

Textauszug

1
Paparazzi

A Genealogy

This chapter describes four key moments in the evolution of the paparazzi industry, running from Rome in the 1950s to Los Angeles in the 2000s. It begins with an introduction to what many people see as the origins of the paparazzi as a profession and the popularization of the term ‘paparazzi’ in Federico Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita (1959), discussing the impact of the photographer Tazio Secchiaroli (who Fellini’s character was based on). The focus then shifts to the United States of the 1960s and 1970s, with a discussion of the most influential photographer in the modern paparazzi industry, Ron Galella, who brought the Italian techniques of street confrontation to capture the era’s political and cultural icons as they exited hotels, apartments and nightclubs. In his pursuit of the wife of John F. Kennedy, Jackie Onassis, Galella foreshadowed the increasingly extreme lengths to which photographers would go to achieve their shots. The chapter then examines how paparazzi photography emerged in the UK, tracing the public’s growing fascination with the British royal family, which notoriously culminated in the recriminations that followed the 1997 death of Princess Diana. Finally, the discussion returns to the United States of the late 1990s, at a point when the long-established paparazzi photographers were jostled by an influx of amateurs, immigrants and ‘citizen’ paparazzi seduced by the promise of big payouts for capturing exclusive images of the likes of Britney Spears. This period, known in the industry as the ‘gold rush’, was characterized by spiralling prices for often unremarkable images, driven by circulation battles between major entertainment publishers, primarily Time Inc’s People Magazine and Wenner Media’s Us Weekly.

Italian paparazzi: Fellini’s Rome

La Dolce Vita, Fellini’s film, follows a tabloid journalist looking for stories – while also searching for a more meaningful way of life – in the glamorous nightclub society of contemporary Rome. It is also seen as a satirical comment on the Italian way of life, in particular the juxtaposition between the traditions of Catholicism and the lifestyle of luxury and glamour portrayed on the Via Veneto. The Catholic Church viewed it as a film ‘that not only reflected a decline in religious fervour in Italy but as a work of art that was actually instrumental in pulling the faithful away from the church’ (Bondanella 2002: 66). The film was both a commercial and critical success at the time, winning the Grand Jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and it grossed over 2.2 billion lire at a time in Italy when cinemagoing was slow, also having cost a total of 600 million lire to make.

In the film, the character ‘Paparazzo’ is one of the photographers who follows stars around Rome’s Via Veneto, annoying them like ‘pests’. This activity – of capturing pictures of famous people without their consent – would be immortalized by the film, and named after this character. However, paparazzi activity can be traced back to before the film’s inception. Fellini was in effect documenting something that had already been happening in the streets of Italy in the 1950s, the way in which photographers would take unsolicited pictures of tourists and American soldiers, then try to sell the prints to them. At this time in Rome, photographers doing this were known as scattini (roughly translated to English as ‘snapper’, no doubt a reference to the notion that these photographers were active and alert on the street, ‘looking for opportunities’ to quickly ‘snap’ with their cameras) (Mormorio 1999: 7). These scattini would wait for tourists and soldiers ‘at crucial spots, and then, with a big smile, offer to take souvenir photographs. Many people accepted, surely just for fun; they posed and then received a card with the location that they were to pick up the snapshot’ (Mormorio 1999: 7). This method was not a particularly lucrative venture, with few people taking up the offer to buy the spontaneous photographs. This prompted the scattini to change their approach:

Rather than shoot indiscriminately, they would instead approach someone, pretend to take their picture – what was really a fake shot – and if the person seemed interested, the scattino would tell him/her to pay twenty lire in advance to get the photograph. Then he offered to take the second shot, just to be on the safe side, and, naturally, it was always the second shot that the clients would see when they went to pick up the photographs. (Mormorio 1999: 7).

The growing divide between ‘dedicated photographers’ and those scattini who were now also supplying images to the press began at this time. Mormorio quotes the founder of the weekly newspaper L’Espresso, Arrigo Benedetti, who referred to the period as the ‘flash age’, noting the rise of a photographer interested in capturing social realism (Benedetti 1970: ix, in Mormorio 1999: 19–20). A class structure emerged in terms of who was and was not a credible photographer. Dedicated photographers were ‘born into “good” families, and many of them were avowed Communists; they experienced photography as an aesthetic choice and a tool of political struggle. As a result, they nurtured a real contempt for those who worked for the tabloids’ (Mormorio 1999: 19).

The leading paparazzi photographers of the 1950s, such as Tazio Secchiaroli and Pierluigi Praturlon, were always looking to incorporate an element of confrontation and surprise into their shots, as these were the pictures that sold best. One of the most dramatic set-ups, in 1958, involved a confrontation between Secchiaroli and the actors Walter Chiari and Ava Gardner. Chiari and Gardner had just come to the end of an evening of nightclubbing. Four Via Veneto photographers who had been following them all night had taken some standard but fairly worthless pictures. As Chiari was parking his car at an apartment building, Secchiaroli, after making sure his collaborators were well-positioned, went up to Gardner and exploded a flash right in Gardner’s face. She screamed and the infuriated Chiari went for Secchiaroli, only to be photographed in the act by one of the waiting photographers. The resulting pictures gave the impression that a fight had broken out, thus enhancing their commercial value (Mormorio 1999: 26).

This period was an important one for the myth of paparazzi. There were other critical contemporaneous developments elsewhere in Europe. As Vanessa Schwartz describes, the Cannes Film Festival was a key event in post-war celebrity culture, ‘where the division between life and art became increasingly thin and photojournalism played a critical role in that dissolution’ (Schwartz 2010: 2). In Cannes, the frenzy surrounding the entry of film stars via the staircase into the festival hall became a spectacle in itself. But perhaps the other key element of this period was the importance of the street as a site of display for celebrities. The Via Veneto became the epicentre for film stars who came to shoot films at Cinecittà, Rome’s version of the Hollywood studio system. As Howe describes:

The famous bars and restaurants, such as the Café de Paris, Doney, and Harry’s Bar, were frequented by a galaxy of glittering personalities – Anita Ekberg, Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Marcello Mastroianni, and Anthony Steele, among them. They came to see and be seen (one of the attractions of the street was that it was wide enough to accommodate their expensive cars) and to show off their equally flashy companions. Magazine readers, in a period when the memory of war and its grim aftermath was only too fresh, loved to see this ostentatious behaviour. (2005: 57)

There are two important observations made here, which point to the growing importance of the paparazzi for the construction of celebrity. The first is the idea of celebrities performing their off-screen personas in public, as opposed to the earlier approach of very limited audience awareness of off-screen personas (Dyer 1998). The second is the notion of escapism on the part of the audience. This period became foundational in terms of the way that paparazzi are understood today. The idea of entrapment, provocation and intrusion on the private life of celebrities remains influential in the public imagination. The period coincided with the growing availability of cheaper cameras, better flash technology and a growth in the use of stylized photographs in the print media. Yet they were also a very distinct product of Italian popular culture, which continues to have a very close association with sensationalism and politics.

1970s American paparazzi: Ron Galella

The second major moment in the creation of the ‘myth’ of the paparazzi came in 1970s New York. Ron Galella was the most well-known paparazzo working the streets of Manhattan, and his contribution to modern-day paparazzi is significant in numerous ways. His pioneering methods have inspired and influenced many photographers who came after him, and his legacy as a paparazzi photographer lives on in this respect. Renowned for spectacular photographs of celebrities such as Marlon Brando, Jackie Onassis and Frank Sinatra, his work came to define the American celebrity culture of the 1970s. His career was discussed in a widely circulated documentary,...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 22.12.2015
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Fotokunst
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Journalistik
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Medienwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• Schlagworte: celebrity culture, fame, photography, gutter press, tabloids, celebrity gossip, TMZ, journalism, privacy • Communication & Media Studies • Cultural Studies • Journalism • Journalismus • Kommunikation u. Medienforschung • Kulturwissenschaften • Media Studies • Medienforschung • popular culture • Volkskultur
• ISBN-10: 0-7456-9808-5 / 0745698085
• ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9808-3 / 9780745698083