PAPARAZZI! PHOTOGRAPHERS, STARS AND ARTISTS

With "Paparazzi! Photographers, Stars and Artists", beginning on June 27, 2014, the SCHIRN presents the most extensive exhibition in Germany on the global phenomenon and the aesthetic of paparazzi photography to date. Around 600 works and documents trace the unbroken fascination with star photography and at the same time reflect its influence on the visual arts and fashion photography. The presentation features "icons" of paparazzi photography that have been permanently etched on our visual memory, including Jackie Kennedy-Onassis during an seemingly casual walk through Manhattan, Lady Di fleeing from a frenzy of flashing cameras, or the younger "favorites" of paparazzi such as Paris Hilton or Britney Spears.

Besides works by the most well-known representatives of paparazzi photography, such as Ron Galella, Pascal Rostain, Bruno Mouron, or Tazio Secchiaroli, the large-scale exhibition presents positions by artists such as Cindy Sherman, Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Barbara Kruger, Paul McCarthy, and Richard Avedon, who have critically examined and sounded out the specific characteristics of the paparazzi aesthetic. Developed and organized by the Centre Pompidou-Metz, using photographs, videos, paintings, sculptures, work objects, documents, and much more the exhibition tells stories from 50 years of paparazzi photography and sets it sights on the paparazzo himself.

The presentation, which has been divided into three chapters, focuses on a profession that is admired and feared in equal measure and which secures its existence for the most part by means of secretly tracking and stalking famous celebrities and has made the tabloid press one of the highest-selling areas in the press sector -- always on the scout and with the goal of publishing exclusive pictures of the unsuspected, the ostensibly confidential, and the personal. In the process, the exhibition also reveals the complex relationships and dependencies that occasionally develop between stars and the photographer.

It is this kind of photography that fascinates and attracts people

The birth of today's term "paparazzo" is 1960, when a photo reporter of the same name appears in Federico Fellini's film La Dolce Vita; however, the director leaves the audience in the dark about the origin of the term. One version is that Fellini fused the Italian words pappataci (small mosquito) and ragazzo (small boy) to form a new artificial world. Another one is that he drew his inspiration from a Victorian travelogue from 1901. Regardless of the fact that the photographer called Paparazzo only plays a minor role in the film, the character and the term have become synonymous with intrusive tabloid photography that transgresses boundaries. It is this kind of photography that fascinates and attracts people, that gives a face to the star cult, and that allows participating in the lives of others -- while accepting that personal or intimate situations do not remain personal or intimate.

The first section of the presentation entitled "Photographers" is devoted to the craft of the paparazzi and its public impact, and it explains the origin of a modern myth. Focus is placed, among other things, on a series of historical photographs, black-and-white images that document the ingenuity of the paparazzi during their often delicate as well as precarious work: including photographers who take to dizzying heights, or those who screw their cameras onto sawed-off rifle butts in order to shoot the one crucial motif.

Stars protecting their faces with their hands

The second chapter of the exhibition, "Stars," illustrates how every couple of years the paparazzi focus their attention on selected celebrities. The profession of paparazzo is essentially a male domain. However, its victims are preferably female stars. The stories of six world famous icons of paparazzi photography -- Jackie Kennedy-Onassis, Brigitte Bardot, Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Diana, Britney Spears, and Paris Hilton -- from the sixties to the present will be used to demonstrate how the style and trends of this type of photograph have changed over the course of its 50-year history.

The third part of the presentation is devoted to the artists. The specific circumstances surrounding the work of paparazzi produce a very unique aesthetic that is regularly assumed and addressed by the art world. Thus, speed and improvisation have had an impact on the pictorial composition of their photographs. Stars protecting their faces with their hands or making obscene gestures in the direction of the camera have become symbols of media encroachment. Since the 1960s, this aesthetic has inspired numerous artists from Pop Art to contemporary currents, including Richard Hamilton's work Release (1972), which is based on a paparazzo photo that appeared in a British daily and shows Mick Jagger on the way to court wearing handcuffs -- a snapshot that has not lost any of its significance even after forty years and is still regarded as the epitome of the swinging sixties.