Ron Galella, controversial photographer who pioneered the paparazzi phenomenon, dies at age 91
Ron Galella, the controversial photographer who pioneered the paparazzi phenomenon as he stalked and hounded the glitterati over a five-decade career — most famously, former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — has died at age 91.
He died of congestive heart failure at his home in Montville, N.J., a family spokesperson told The New York Times.
The Bronx-bred Galella put himself on the map in the 1960s by chasing after celebrities and snapping their photos as they went about their daily business. The result was candid photos that appealed to the public’s hunger for images, but at a cost to the unwitting, and often unwilling, subjects.
Most notably, Galella followed Kennedy Onassis, the widow of President John F. Kennedy, virtually everywhere she went. She fought his invasion of her privacy in court for more than a decade, pushing back against his “constant surveillance” that made her life “intolerable, almost unlivable,” according to testimony cited by The New York Times. He stopped in 1981 after being threatened with decades of jail time.
He sold those images of her and many another famous persons to outlets ranging from Time to the National Enquirer, and his photographs came to be highly regarded as candid chronicles of the time. Legions of paparazzi followed in those footsteps.
Galella served as a U.S. Air Force photographer during the Korean War and went on to earn a photojournalism degree at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. He was married for nearly 40 years to Betty Burke Galella, who became a photojournalist, editor and business partner supporting his work and helping establish his photo agency, Ron Galella Ltd. before her death in 2017. He was also known for photographing the Met Gala every year, and continued doing so after retiring.
While he was vilified, sued and even had his jaw broken and teeth knocked out by actor Marlon Brando — — Galella also gained artistic recognition. Six of his photos ended up in the permanent collection at MoMA, and his images were shown in the Staley-Wise Gallery, the spot that also represents such photography icons as Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton and Herb Ritts.
“I think Ron’s a guy that had no moral compass,” Etheleen Staley, who brought his work to Staley-Wise, told Town & Country in 2020. “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.”
One of his most famous images, “Windblown Jackie,” caught her without makeup, informally dressed, walking up Madison Ave. Galella recounted for Forbes how he got the photo.
“I was driving in the backseat of a taxi and the taxi driver blew his horn — a stroke of luck, I didn’t ask him to — and that’s how I got that great picture,” Galella told Forbes in a 2020 interview. “She has a Mona Lisa smile. She didn’t know it was me because I was holding my camera up. But once I got out of the car, and she saw it was me, she put her glasses on. I got her for another block. She turned to me and said, ‘Are you pleased with yourself?’ I said, ‘Yes, I am, thank you, goodbye.’ "
On his website, Galella characterized his work as images of “iconic people caught unrehearsed, spontaneous in his inimitable style” and saw himself as “providing unrehearsed, spontaneous images of real moments, not the scripted pictures the agencies and film studios wanted you to see.”
He saw the unremitting stalking he was accused of as a “pioneering style and relentless work ethic” that enabled viewers to “enjoy a new avenue to view their favorite celebrities,” his bio states.
His 22nd book, “100 Iconic Photographs: A Retrospective by Ron Galella,” was published in December 2021.
