Wholesale Paparazzi

This volume travels through the history and legend of the “paparazzi,” a phenomenon born in Rome during the 1950s and ’60s, when the city was considered “Hollywood on the Tiber River.” Hastily captured shots of the protagonists of that season—the divas and stars of the silver screen and the denizens of the Via Veneto—make up Paparazzi, a riotous celebration of the glamorous underworld of celebrity photography, and the snapshot aesthetic it helped promote. Photos by Tazio Secchiaroli, Marcello Geppetti, Elio Sorci, Ron Galella and many other prominent figures of the 1960s are featured alongside reproductions of the magazine pages where the images first appeared. Also included in this volume are contemporary images by artists such as Alison Jackson, Armin Linke and Ellen von Unwerth mobilizing the visual language of paparazzi photography, showing the legacy of this heroic era of the paparazzo.