7/7/2023 0 Comments In retrospect multi paparazziAs the curator Carol Squiers has written, when Secchiaroli took his fateful photographs of Ekberg in 1958, “he couldn’t have foreseen the phenomenon he was helping to create – a multibillion-dollar industry that became known as paparazzi photography”. The character, Paparazzo, was based on the Italian photographer Tazio Secchiaroli, who became one of the first paparazzi when he shot the star of La Dolce Vita, Anita Ekberg, enjoying a night out in Rome with her husband a couple of years before the film was released. The term ‘paparazzo’ is often attributed to the Italian film director Federico Fellini, who combined the words ‘pappataci’ (sandflies) and ‘ragazzi’ (ruffians) in the name of a character who worked as a news photographer in his 1960 film La Dolce Vita. Rather, it can be exciting and fertile when it comes to making art. For artists like Hamilton, the aesthetic of paparazzi photography isn’t beyond the pale. Yet a new exhibition, Paparazzi! Photographers, Stars and Artists at the Centre Pompidou Metz in France, suggests that visual artists often take a different view. Paparazzi pictures are viewed and enjoyed by millions around the world, but the people who take them are considered morally dubious, if ingenious. Ever since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in a car crash in Paris in 1997, when a chasing pack of photographers was popularly blamed for forcing her chauffeur into a fatal error of judgement, paparazzi photographers have been routinely abused – unlike other photojournalists like war photographers, who are often praised. This is perhaps surprising, because it is hard to think of a maker of images more maligned than the paparazzo, a freelance photographer who pursues celebrities to grab unofficial and often unflattering pictures that can then be flogged to tabloid newspapers and gossip magazines. Whether or not Hamilton intended this allusion to Masaccio, Swingeing London 67 is a brilliant example of a modern artist discovering inspiration in a photograph taken by a paparazzo. By the end of the decade, the ‘60s had become a time of reckoning rather than partying of severe, “swingeing” penalties, not drug-taking. In other words, the paradise of the Swinging ‘60s was over. Wearing a striped green tie and a turquoise suit, Jagger, who is handcuffed to the flamboyant art dealer Robert Fraser, raises his manacled right hand to shield his eyes from the glare of the photographer’s flash.Īccording to the American art historian Hal Foster, Jagger’s gesture – the archetypal defensive pose of an embarrassed celebrity caught unawares by the paparazzi – recalls The Expulsion from Paradise, a famous fresco by the 15th-Century Florentine painter Masaccio in which Adam clutches his face with both hands in shame and despair. In this sequence of paintings and prints, several of which feature in a new retrospective at Tate Modern in London, Hamilton presented variations on a notorious newspaper photograph in which The Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger can be seen in the back of a prison van travellingto Chichester Magistrates Court, where he faced charges of illegal drug possession. In 1968 the British artist Richard Hamilton, one of the fathers of Pop art, began Swingeing London 67, a famous series of works.
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