WRITERS PRIZE: 17 / JAN / 2025
SHOOTING ON CAMERAS, SHOOTING WITH A GUN
by Emma Aars
Jackie is running across a big field in Central Park, heading for a forest. She is no longer a Kennedy, and probably happy her life is no longer regulated by presidential guards and the strictures of the White House. They wouldn't allow her to run as freely as she is doing here, now, in the uncut grass, free from tight Chanel suits and long Givenchy dresses. Jeans and flats makes it easier to run away from the paparazzi photographer Ron Galella’s stalking lens.
Ron Galella’s world is full of celebrities. His proximity to the stars makes him a kind of star himself, being the paparazzo behind many of the most iconic celebrity images of the last century. Photographed in black and white with an intruding flash, his pictures are full of diamond-dressed hands pushing his lens away as they eat, curse or flee from shot. Galella observes a glamour few of us are ever close to, yet the viewer gets to touch through his photographs. Occasionally, the glamour touches upon Galella, too. Marlon Brando once punched the photographer in the face, kicking out a few teeth and leaving him with a fractured jaw.
Jackie eventually pushes him up against a car, too, demanding he stop following her – a threat he takes as an intimate gesture, a compliment. Not everyone gets to be touched by such a star. Where Jackie walks, Galella follows. Shot through cab windows or walking between cars in a traffic jam: He ends up capturing some of the most iconic images of her, creating 'Jackie O' – the muse we know so well. He might be the annoying artist, but she is the art.
There must have been a lot of running in Jackie’s life. There must have been a lot of escape in Jackie’s life. There must have been a lot of fight or flight responses, too, as she sat next to her husband as he was shot dead in their convertible, Dallas, 1963. The images of Kennedy’s assassination are among the most iconic in American history. Iconic in the American way where reality feels slightly fake, and where even the biggest tragedy has something exciting and precious about it.
I am reminded of this American feeling after the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump, who happened to turn his head at the exact moment a trigger was pulled from a building nearby. Seconds later, blood everywhere, and once again, Trump all over the news. His ear shot, but he rises.
The photographs circulating in the days following Trump’s ear shooter are nothing less than iconic. An almost-perfect composition: protective secret service agents, blue sky, American Flag, a fist in the air. Another photo, with a background light that wraps the wounded ear in glory, could easily have been a haunted, pornographic centrepiece shot by photographer Torbjørn Rødland.
It is difficult to write about these assaults, failed or successful, without using the word iconic, even if it gives the wrong connotations. Iconic sounds glorifying and excited, yet I can’t find a better term for these images. Not because they are beautiful, but because they are ideological.
When Galella approaches Jackie, and breaks his twenty-five feet restraint order, as defined by U.S. District Court of New York in 1972, her bodyguards step in. Just like the stars, these agents block the lens with their hands, or they run after Ron, who runs after Jackie, who sprints away from the photo, into a black-and-white landscape. Dark t-shirt, slim jeans. Jackie might miss the life of presidential security and conformity, where she wouldn’t have to run away from the Italian-American paparazzo. There, he wouldn’t have a chance to get so close. She tries to escape the very shots that will become her legacy.
Galella and his glorious subjects exist in a bubble of their own, as their fame shines onto him, and fiction and fact intertwine into glorious images of American icons. Galella lives in New Jersey, a home that"would make Tony Sopranos’ friends proud", Glen O’Brian writes in an interview with the photographer. In fact, it was once considered as the location for the mafia boss’ home, but it didn’t have a pool.
Images: Ron Galella.
Shooting on cameras, shooting with a gun was shortlisted for the Source prize for new writing about photography in 2024.
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