Ron Galella, the photographer who practically invented the paparazzi genre as he stalked and hounded the glitterati, has died at age 91.
He died of congestive heart failure at his home in Montville, New Jersey, a family spokesperson told The New York Times.
His 22nd book, “100 Iconic Photographs: A Retrospective by Ron Galella,” was published in December 2021.
Galella put himself on the map in the 1960s by hounding celebrities, 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 notoriously Galella followed Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the widow of President John F. Kennedy, virtually everywhere she went. She fought his invasion of 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 sold those images of her and many another famous person to outlets ranging from Time to The National Enquirer, and his photographs came to be highly regarded as candid chronicles of the time.
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