“My job is thick with risks, threats, occasional violence and sometimes the necessary folly that sometimes courts humiliation and ridicule. But I don’t care. I see myself as the dean of American paparazzi.” -Ron Galella
The term “paparazzo” was first heard in 1960 in the Federico Fellini movie Lo Dolce Vita. 10 years later Ron Galella became its embodiment. He is undoubtedly the world’s most famous and arguably the most infamous of all of the paparazzi.
Air Force
Ron Galella studied art in high school He served in the Air Force during the Korean War as a photographer because that was the only job close to art in the service. He was discharged in 1955 and then went to the Los Angeles Art Center College of Design. He graduated in 1958. He started selling photos he made at LA-based film premieres.
Born in New York
He grew up in the north Bronx. After leaving Los Angeles, he moved back to New York and made his home in Yonkers. He made photos of children while he built his celebrity photography business. He compared himself to Helmut Newton and Irving Penn with the difference of wanting his subjects to not be controlled, unlike the images in magazines. Andy Warhol called Ron Galella his favorite photographer. He said, “My idea of a good picture is one that is in focus and of a famous person doing something infamous.”
Betty Lou Burke
Ron Galella started selling photos to an editor of Washington’s Today is Sunday magazine in 1976. Two years later, Galella met Burke at the premiere of Superman. They were married in 1979. Burke became his business partner. Galella said he, “fell in love with her voice.” Later he said she made him rich.
They moved to a large home in Montville, New Jersey. Ron Galella put his name, handprints and a star on the walkway leading into the house. Their marriage lasted until 2017 the year Betty died.
Jackie Kennedy Onassis
Ron Galella’s favorite subject was the widow of President Kennedy. He followed her on the streets of New York City.
He made hundreds, perhaps thousands of photos of her during the 1970s and early 1980s.
The opening photo’s top row L-R shows Windblown Jackie, Jackie in 1976, Lee Radziwill and Jackie in 1963 and at the 1976 Valentino show where she is in the audience between the two models. The first photo in the bottom row pictures Jackie in Central Park running full out away from Galella.
By 1974 he had so many photos of the first lady that he put them together in a book called “Jacqueline: My Obsession,” available although expensive, on Amazon. The cover features the photograph Galella named Windblown Jackie. Galella considered this image his Mona Lisa. The story of the photo is in this video.
Broken jaw
Ron Galella never wanted to expose his subjects. He revealed their humanity with his tenacious pursuit of making their photos. He understood that reality and the fiction that often portrayed his subjects lived side by side.
That’s not to say that there was no danger in the making of his celebrity photographs. Actor Marlon Brando walked with talk show host Dick Cavett on June 12, 1973, in Manhatten’s Chinatown. He turned to Galella who had been following him all day (opening photo, bottom row, second image.)
“What else do you want that you don’t already have?” an exasperated Brando asked. Galella replied, “I’d like a picture without the sunglasses.” Brando turned him down. Galella told him that celebrities’ eyes were “what editors want to see.”
Brando sucker-punched Galella in the mouth knocking out five teeth and breaking his jaw. Galella said he got $40,000 from Brando to settle a lawsuit.
Actor Diane Keaton (Annie Hall) wrote in the forward to “Photographs of Ron Galella 1960-1990,” that Galella was the best chronicler of the fleeting beauty of the beautiful people of his time. “In Galella’s photographs,” she wrote, “Marlon Brando is still the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.”
Sources: New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Vogue.
Read other stories of inspiring photographers in On Photography.
