A CANDID, KIND PAPARAZZO

“Smash His Camera” is a show of photographs by Ron Galella, a legendary paparazzo, at Clic Gallery in downtown Manhattan. Galella, the author of many books of photography and the subject of a recent HBO documentary, has been snapping celebrity pictures since the 1960s. The subjects gathered for this modest show include Michael Jackson, David Bowie, Lauren Hutton and others. Some of these snapshots are immediately recognisable.

Since most of the prints are affixed with a price sticker, it’s tempting to wander around the gallery for a crass game of price-comparison. A print of a senior Mick Jagger in summer whites goes for $1,800, for example, while $3,500 will net Andy Warhol posing with his camera. Prices for a Madonna or a Michael Jackson fall in between, at around $2,300. Woe to the celebs whose prints fall well short of an image of the elderly Jagger.

Galella clearly belongs to the old school of paparazzo. His photographs are candid but their intention is mainly to flatter. Images of Jerry Hall caught mid-sentence and Catherine Deneuve exiting a car make their subjects look casually glamorous, not pedestrian or invaded. If today’s paparazzi photos work to explode the idea that stars are a different species by showing them sloppily drunk, taking out the trash, or smashing a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella, Galella’s work takes the opposite tack. It burnishes the myth.

This doesn’t make the work dishonest, however. One Galella specialty is the intimate moment captured in a public scenario: a photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono whispering conspiratorially during a fancy dinner, say, or one of Jackie Onassis riding a bicycle through the park with her son (which provoked Onassis to sue Galella for harassment in 1972). It’s hard to imagine today’s paparazzi photographs nicely matted and hanging for sale in a future SoHo gallery. Today’s pictures tend to act as vehicles of salacious or damning information. One gets the sense in viewing Galella’s photographs that he was ultimately on the side of his subjects, even if his presence was irksome. His shots are unposed, but they are kind.

"Smash His Camera: The Notorious Photographs of Ron Galella" is at New York's Clic Gallery until June 30th.

~ MOLLY YOUNG