After being hassled by a lurking photographer throughout the night, the actress emerged from her home in the early morning hours with a bow and arrow and shot him in the hand. Anita Ekberg, Fellini’s paparazzi-hounded star, became the real-life target of paparazzi camera in 1960. In the cult Italian film La Dolce Vita, Fellini captured this phenomenon in remarkable accuracy, finding inspiration for Paparazzo in the photographer he knew well from the cafes in Via Veneto, Felice Quinto, who was known as the "king of paparazzi". The exhibition places special focus on the Rome of Via Veneto and the Dolce Vita, featuring protagonists of that unforgettable season in Italy, from Anita Ekberg to Ava Gardner, from Michelangelo Antonioni to Federico Fellini, from Walter Chiari to Richard Burton and Liz Taylor, to name but some of the best known. The exhibition opens with these images from the heyday of the Italian Paparazzi, reconstructing the visual and cultural climate in which these photos were first created and circulated, with particular attention to magazines, then the main information channel. The paparazzi phenomenon exploded in Rome in the second half of the 1950s, when key figures from Italy such as Tazio Secchiaroli, Marcello Geppetti, Elio Sori, Lino Nanni, and Ezio Vitale began to work increasingly hard to catch unposed informal images of stars like Ava Gardner, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Sophia Loren. Titled Paparazzi! - Photographers and Stars from the Dolce Vita to the Present Day, the exhibition serves as a peculiar visual itinerary through the practice of so-called "stolen photography", through which it is possible to reconstruct historical moments and phenomena of custom, in an ongoing reflection on the roles and functions of photography.īringing together photos from the 1950s right up to its developments in contemporary imagery, the show features the rich and famous, “along with those who would have liked to become so,” as explained by curator Walter Guadagnini.Īgenzia Dufoto - Paparazzi in vespa seguono l’auto di Soraya Roma, 1959 circa The Beginnings of Paparazzi Photography The current exhibition at Gallerie d’Italia, Palazzo Leoni Montanari at Intesa Sanpaolo’s museum in Vicenza, Italy explores the history of this pop-cultural phenomenon, tracking its evolution from Fellini to infamy. Ever since, paparazzi photography has been inspiring mixed feelings, influencing customs, fashions and sometimes even deciding the very fate of the one or ones featured in those images.
It was first introduced to the culture at large by the Italian director Federico Fellini and his film La Dolce Vita, in which Marcello Mastroianni plays a disenchanted tabloid reporter who lurks around the nightlife in Rome looking for his next story, followed by a photographer called Paparazzo. It has been almost sixty years that the term "paparazzi" was coined.
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