It took only a decade from the time Federico Fellini’s 1960 film La Dolce Vita gave the world the term “paparazzo” for Ron Galella, who has died aged 91, to become the best known, and most infamous of paparazzi. Though his trade was photography, he benefited from the growth of television, which brought celebrities into American households daily, and from the precarious balance between celebrities’ need to be seen and their desire for privacy.
He sometimes tried to explain his trade as a kind of friendly symbiosis with his subjects, but Galella’s own fame was built on his contentious relationship with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
In 1969 Galella jumped out from behind a bush to grab a snap of Jackie and her eight-year-old son, John F Kennedy Jr, on bicycles entering Central Park, New York. Reacting to the boy’s frightened response, Secret Service agents handcuffed Galella as Jackie yelled “smash his camera”. He sued her, and when her husband Aristotle Onassis offered to settle, asked for a million dollars.
Instead of paying, the Onassises countersued. Jackie testified that Galella made her life “intolerable, almost unlivable,” and that she had “no peace, no peace of mind”. In 1972 a judge issued a restraining order, keeping Galella 150 feet away (the distance was reduced to 25ft on appeal).
He collected his photos in a bestselling book, Jacqueline (1974), but the battle continued; Galella even dated the family’s maid to gather information on Jackie’s movements. In his most famous photo, titled Windblown Jackie, he surprised her from a taxi window. Her expression, part-hidden by her hair, is one of almost bemused capitulation. Onassis compared him to a sniper aiming at JFK. Galella once explained: “I had no girlfriend; she was my girlfriend in a way.”
The game ended in 1982 when, after Galella’s 12th violation of the restraining order, a judge threatened to jail him, and he agreed to take no more pictures of her.
By then, however, his reputation, burnished by confrontation, was secure. In 1971 he cut through the shrubbery surrounding Doris Day’s estate to get a poolside picture of her in a bikini. He hid in a Mexican hotel’s pool pump room to capture images of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; their film crew beat him, and he was arrested.
In 1973, Galella stopped Marlon Brando in the street, and asked him to take off his sunglasses for a shot. The actor sucker-punched him, knocking out five of the photographer’s teeth and breaking his jaw.
Eventually, Galella’s lawsuit against Brando was settled for $40,000 (though Brando never paid the full amount) and he gloated that Brando’s fist had been cut and infected by “paparazzi germs”. Another of his most famous shots, taken by an assistant, showed him later stalking Brando, protected by an American football helmet.
By the end of the 1970s, Galella had assistants covering other venues while he staked out the most fashionable places, such as the nightclub Studio 54 or Elaine’s restaurant, which drew celebrities like moths to flame. He photographed the restaurateur Elaine Kaufman throwing bin lids at him while yelling “beat it, creep”.
Galella was born in New York, to Italian immigrant parents. His father, Vincenzo, built coffins and pianos; he barely spoke English and made and drank his own wine. His mother, Michelina (nee Marinaccio), loved the glamour of American life; she named Ron, her favourite child, after the Hollywood film actor Ronald Colman. He grew up in the north Bronx, and would eventually settle just across the city line in Yonkers, in a house one of his brothers built close to his mother’s.
He studied art in high school, but during the Korean war enlisted in the US air force, where he could serve as a photographer. He studied a manual on “glamour” work, thinking it would help him meet women, but after his discharge in 1955 enrolled in Los Angeles’ Art Centre College of Design, graduating in 1958. He also took classes in acting and design at the Pasadena Playhouse, and began selling snaps he took at film premieres.
He moved back to Yonkers. “New York City was like a girlfriend,” he said, in a creepy parallel with his comments about Jackie. “We dated but I never moved in.” He took children’s pictures while expanding his celebrity business. He rarely used his viewfinder, relying on a sense of staging he learned while studying theatre and taking many shots from which he could choose the best.
He wanted images the subject could not control; comparing himself to portrait photographers such as Irving Penn or Helmut Newton, he pointed to their subjects’ control, and of course, they were paid far more for their pictures than newspapers paid him.
Andy Warhol called Galella his favourite photographer. “My idea of a good picture is one that is in focus and of a famous person doing something infamous,” he explained; that might have been the motto of Warhol’s own Interview magazine.
In 1976 Galella began selling to Betty Lou Burke, an editor at Washington’s Today Is Sunday magazine, and “fell in love with her voice”. They met two years later at the Washington premiere of Superman, and he said “I’m gonna marry you.” A few months later, in 1979, she became his wife, and later his business manager, and he said she made him rich. They moved to a mansion in Montville, New Jersey, and he put a star with his name and handprints on the front path.
A 2001 book, The Photographs of Ron Galella, paid for by Gucci, with essays by Tom Ford and Diane Keaton, who acknowledged the beauty of Galella’s subjects, led to the launch of a Michael Kors fashion line called Galella Glamour in 2004. This new success, and his bad back and knees, led Galella to retire in 2004.
Major galleries began showing his images and he began producing books collecting his previous work, including Donald Trump: The Master Builder (2017). In 2010, Leon Gast directed an award-winning documentary, Smash His Camera.
Betty died in 2017.
• Ronald Edward Galella, photographer, born 10 January 1931; died 30 April 2022
