A look at paparazzi photographs

Marlon Brando packed a mean right punch. That punch gave photographer Ron Galella a broken jaw and took out some of his teeth. The reporter and his camera got too close to the powerful actor at just the wrong moment. In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of stars knew how to take things into their own hands when they felt they were being pestered by photographers. Today, that kind of trouble is settled by lawyers.

Back then, the paparazzi were not yet shunned as the bandits of photojournalism. They were considered pioneers who dared to take a new angle on famous people from show business and the nobility. They were not interested in stiff poses or artificial smiles. They wanted to capture the "real" stars. The snapshots "stolen" by the paparazzi went a long way to breaking down the walls of legend surrounding "the top ten thousand."

Now the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin has, for the first time, dedicated an exhibition to this "classic" era of paparazzi photography and its founding fathers. It takes the observer back to a time in which a combination of inventiveness, speed and persistence - topped with a pinch of audacity - led to a completely new kind of photography. Paparazzi and prominent citizens entered into symbiosis in a strange mixture of distance and proximity. It was a symbiosis that was to change the public image of stars and crowned heads forever.

Anger at the secret snapping of photos was usually covered up with a smile. The exhibition shows images of Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Woody Allen, Robert de Niro, Prince Charles, Caroline of Monaco, Brigitte Bardot and Carla Bruni - it is a panorama of the glittering world of fame and fortune. And they all - all of them - play the game of unofficial photography more or less willingly. Because every one of these famous people knows that his or her public status grows with every snapshot. And nothing could be worse than having no one wanting to take your picture.

The exhibition also reflects Newton's relationship with the paparazzi. He appreciated the early practitioners of "revelation photography," such as the German Erich Salomon, and the Austrian Arthur Fellig, who, as photojournalists took "forbidden" photos of political events and of crime scenes. And after he saw Federico Fellini's film, "La Dolce Vita," Newton spent a long time focusing on the paparazzi phenomenon.

In 1970, he worked with some of them at the magazine "Linea Italiana." He got the paparazzi to act as if in a real situation, aggressively snapping his models - who were wearing the latest designer fashions - and himself created images that sometimes seemed staged and sometimes lifted from real life. In the late 1980s, Newton and his models strutted on the Croisette in Cannes, where a crowd of photographers pounced on what they thought could only be film stars. Once again, Newton used the scene as a background for his own images.

The exhibition in Berlin brings together about 350 photos by Salomon, Fellig, Ron Gallela, Edward Quinn, Daniel Agnelli, Tazio Secchiaroli and Jean Pigozzi. The latter, with his own social standing, enjoys direct access to the world of the rich and beautiful. He most clearly reveals the ambiguous relationship between photographers and famous people. Most of those photographed only pretend to be annoyed as they permit the snapshots to be taken. Because they themselves know that the boundaries between the private sphere and public perception are fluid.

This mute agreement, however, has been increasingly dissolving since the 1980s. The paparazzi invested in hi-tech gadgetry and sometimes overstepped the line. Today's marauding photographers who seek to put the private lives of famous people on parade have nothing in common with the gentlemen paparazzi who captured special moments in days gone by.

By the way, Galella learned his lesson from the close encounter with Marlon Brando: whenever he met him in later years, he donned a football helmet with a chin guard - just to make sure.

- Klaus Grimberg