Celebrity photographer Dave Benett has shot all the greats in his thirty years as the Evening Standard’s party pap
(Picture: Evening Standard)Dave Benett, paparazzi extraordinaire — and this publication’s showbiz and society photographer since the mid-Eighties — traces the birth of our obsession with celebrity to a precise moment: “Liz Taylor’s 50th birthday party at Legend’s [the now shuttered Old Burlington Street nightclub]. It was hosted for her by Richard Burton and was a most ridiculous, lavish affair.”
Working as a news and current affairs photographer at the time this, he explains, was his first brush with showbiz royalty. “It was 1982 and I’d never really seen that sort of pap chase. The flashing lights, everyone clambering over the car, chasing them back to where she was living.” A year or two later (and on a decidedly less glamorous note) “the papers started reporting storylines from Coronation Street on their front pages,” he explains. “I knew then that things were changing, that showbiz was becoming news.”
