Paparazzo is a term for photographers who take unstaged and/or candid photographs of celebrities caught unaware. They tend to take pictures of celebrities when they are not expecting people to notice, things that they would think they could do without being bothered. Many media outlets will pay a high price for unique photographs of celebrities, such as shots of them in more candid or vulnerable moments. Many paparazzi try to get naked photographs of celebrities, always a hot item with more sordid magazines. Others catch them on bad hair days, wandering the streets of the supermarket, or socializing with friends and families. The paparazzi may break onto private property in the quest for a perfect photograph, or crash private events.
The photographs are legal if they are taken from a public spot and the celebrities (who need the entertainment news media and generate the nipple slips and pantiless vehicle exits) are public persons in the news (meaning not for commercial purposes like advertising or product endorsements).
"The rule is that if you're in the magazines you're alive and the public will know who you are," Tiegel explains about celebrities in the media. "Once you're not doing anything and you fade away from all these tabloid magazines who fight every week to produce the same stories most of the time, you disappear -- which means you're not popular anymore."
"Celebrities need a higher level of exposure than the rest of us," says Peter Howe, author of Paparazzi, which chronicles the history of the trade. "So it is a two-way street. The celebrities manipulate the paparazzi too."
Seeing how people look at paparazzi is probably going to have an impact on how I take images for this project. I do not want to be seen as a nuisance but I want to be able to take images of people without them being aware. I feel like the process is just as important as the images that I end up with in the end. I still haven’t been able to find the legalities that are attached to this topic but I feel that as long as I am on public property I should be ok legally because how else would paparazzi be able to take pictures?
1. Is Everyone a Journalist?, Tony Sonenshine, American Journalism Review, October 1997.
2. Have celebrities finally snapped? The Guardian May 4, 2009.
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