Photo Review: Tazio Secchiaroli – the first paparazzi

A paparazzi is the annoying chirping of a cicada or the buzzing of a fly which cannot be swept away. At least that’s what the Italian sounding of the word, in one of the dialects of Italian supposedly meaning “house pest”, reminds them of. Paparazzo is the last name of one of the characters in Fellini’s “Sweet Life” whose character was copied from a real photographer of the era. His name was Tazio Secchiaroli.

Brigitte Bardot

One of the events of “Fashion and Style in Photography 2011” was the exhibition “Tazio Secchiaroli. First paparazzi” which introduced the works of the famous Italian, who is called “the father of all paparazzi”, to the New York public. The magical story of a “little man” who according to his own diligence and capricious Fortune became a celebrity, sounds especially relevant to our time, in which the camera ended up in the hands of millions of similar “heroes of the crowd”, who dream to turn it into a tool to make money and one morning wake up as a star.

This is not the first time Secchiaroli’s work has been shown in New York. We already saw his solo exhibition in 2003, in the context of “Fashion and Style in Photography”. At that time it was a part of the enormous “Flash Of Art” project, brought from Italy and gathered by the famous curator and critic Achille Bonito Oliva. Action Photography in Rome, 1953-1973. However, if in 2003, the emphasis was on Secchiaroli’s belonging to the paparazzi movement, in 2011, the photographer’s work taken from the collections of collector Anatoly Zlobovsky and MDF himself was put into a slightly different context. In such unexpected echoes, by the way, is the power of such festivals. On the one hand, this huge exhibition “Fellini. Grand Parade!”The juxtaposition with which emphasizes the “cinematographic”, the alignment of Sechiaroli’s shots of that stage of his life, when he left paparazzi and became the favorite and chronicler of Federico Fellini, and then the official personal photographer of Sophia Loren. On the other hand, this is a powerful chord of exhibitions devoted to Italian realist photography of the 1950s-70s and contemporary Italian authors, as well as Juergen Teller’s staff. The latter seemingly has nothing to do with Sechiaroli, but it raises the question of the thin line between the “greatness” of the contemporary author, who does not doubt the self-value of his gaze, and the imperceptibility of the 1950s-70s paparazzi, eluding not only his furious heroes, but also the clear statement of his emotions and point of view, balancing on the edge of emptiness and a strange tact.

Sechiaroli’s most famous shots are one big illustration of the tale of the sweet life. However, his own life did not start with fairy tale subjects. Born in 1926 in Rome to a worker’s family, Tazio became a watchman at the Cinecitta film studio on the outskirts of Rome at the age of fifteen. When he was seventeen, his aunt lent him an old Kodak. This is how Tazio became a street photographer in the mid-1940s, and the streets of post-war Rome were teeming with them, always running around with cameras and bulky flashes in motion to catch the scoop, half-starving and desperate for a piece of bread. And yet such a career seemed almost like paradise: 50 years later, Sechiaroli confessed that one of the decisive moments in his fascination with photography was the fact that “the camera is much lighter than a digger’s pickaxe”. With his first “Kodak,” he filmed his many relatives, the flight of German troops from Rome, the solemn entry of Americans into the Italian capital, and crowds of tourists. As well as less attractive and not at all touristy views. Fights between communist and fascist sympathizers, beggars on their knees with classical hats in their hands, kids with scruffy skin and traveling musicians, homeless people and their tired dogs dragging their owners’ kennels or sleeping with a shopping cart… In the last shot, by the way, the photographer’s eyes are focused on the tired dog, and the beggar kneeling before the priest in a black cassock, and the gaudy crowd flowing around them, the part the author apparently so wanted to be in, seem to be just a blurry illusion.

Or didn’t want to? After all, this strange, hard to define with words detachment from people, defocused sensations even in the brightest, juiciest, compositionally verified shots remained with Sechiaroli in other, more well-fed times. But this is not the famous, attentive-neutral, singling out people from the background, “research”, but full of human compassion in the highest, humanistic sense of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Secchiaroli is not a researcher. But he’s not an author like Vigi, savouring other people’s pain with morbid curiosity of a gaper. He is simply part of the surrounding poor, if not destitute, postwar Italian life, the life of a people first embroiled in the war and then defeated. And compassion for a beggar is compassion “for someone just like me”, but in a more casual way, not as an educated person talks about a “little man” or a “for whom the bell tolls”, but as a comrade in arms, as an equal, but without excessive sympathy. That’s probably why you feel the most emotion when you look at Secchiaroli’s dogs and kids the adults are part of the background for him, and for emotions about them in someone who’s struggling to make ends meet, but is not a victim of circumstances anyway, it’s like he simply doesn’t have the strength.

To fit into the format, to fulfill an order, to create a legend, while admiring a little female beauty or showing a fleeting compassion for a homeless man – this seems to be the main task of Sechiaroli’s photographer, whether he is shooting reportage, chasing film divas and objects of the audience’s dreams, or making “allowed” portraits of them. And he masterfully performs it when he transforms from “just a reporter” on the editorial assignment to a paparazzi, capturing on film the life of the rich and famous boiling around him in the studio and in the city.

In the Fifties, having worked at the agency of one of the founders of Italian photojournalism, Adolfo Porri Pastorel, and even founded along with Sergio Spinelli his own agency, Roma Press Photo, Tazio joined the ranks of photographers who sought to capture the hidden but alluring lives of millions of idols at any cost and became part of the fledgling “image consumption” culture. Sechiaroli said later that he supposedly invented the idea to spy on Venetto street celebrities and then to sell these pictures to newspapers and magazines. This street was the only one in the whole strict Catholic Rome at that time where the nightlife was boiling the world-famous film actors lived. Here one could see, for example, a drunken Jane Mansfield, Elizabeth Taylor embracing her husband, Orson Welles buying newspapers, and Audrey Hepburn shaking her hand at photographers’ prying eyes.

Filming on Rome’s Via Venetta initially infuriated their subjects. There are, for example, a series of shots of actor Anthony Steele with his face twisted in anger, chasing paparazzi Paolo Pavia who only wanted to take shots of movie diva Anita Ekberg getting out of his car and the small and fearless Sechiaroli himself running away from the furious Walter Chiari the scene was shot by his colleague Elio Sorci . And next to the magical world of the characters in the movie tale – a chronicle of the lives of the authors themselves, photographing each other in the moments of work and rest. According to Tazio Secchiaroli’s son David, his father knew the secret of a good paparazzi: the more furious the hero would be in the picture, the better it would sell. That’s why 10-15 photographers tried to piss off the actors in every possible way, literally on the heels of their victims. The crew was on the run or in motor scooters. By the way, received for their work, the first paparazzi a little bit, it was only to the early 1970’s, when the public has properly infected the disease of stars, for such photos began to pay high fees.

When we look at the cards of this period of the “first paparazzi” life, we notice two series that are a little out of the ordinary – and, as it turns out, not for nothing. Both of them were taken in 1958. One was a “Miracle in Terni” ostensibly documentary, but in fact from beginning to end, a staged photo: peasants carefully pretending to watch the descent of Our Lady from heaven while the photographer snapped this “testimony. To be fair, the “false” phenomenon was invented by the inhabitants, two children of whom allegedly saw Madonna a couple of kilometers away from Terni, while Sechiaroli was only sent to film the scene. The completely unnatural expressions of amazement and false piety on the faces of the enterprising peasants were criticized by the Vatican – and were included as an episode in the film “Sweet Life”. It is interesting to ponder Sechiarole’s “concoction” of pseudo-real stories, of “fake” documentary shooting which existed, incidentally, in parallel with the Soviet tradition of manipulative reporting about the industrial heights taken and the giant wheat grown in connection with the current blurring of the border between documentary shooting and art photography. An even bigger scandal, which almost provoked a powerful political crisis, was a series of pictures of striptease at the villa of a certain member of parliament filmed by Sechiaroli and published by l’Espresso on November 16, 1958. Part of the production was confiscated, politicians and members of the jet set were ostracized by Catholics, but it was thanks to this shot that Sechiaroli’s fortune smiled: Fellini was interested in him. They say he invited a photographer to a cafe, questioned him thoroughly and sketched the idea for “Sweet Life” on napkins right at the table rumor has it that the director initially even wanted the photographer to play himself .

From this moment on, an entirely different chapter of Sechiaroli’s life began: he stopped being a half-starved reporter and became a star himself, a glamorous film photographer. The main characters of his works of this time are Federico Fellini and Sophia Loren. The latter met him during the shooting of “Marriage in Italian” in 1964, and then worked with him for 20 years. The control cards with the portraits of the movie diva recorded during the photo session with Richard Avedon and sometimes even reflected in his glasses , with the notes of the actress herself, are curious: you can see how carefully she worked with her image. But there are almost no blank shots on film, and even the ones chosen by Lauren’s hand are masterfully made. Sechiaroli also created beautiful portraits of other actors – the inimitable Marcello Mastroianni, the beautiful Brigitte Bardot, the romantic Anouk Aimé, the velvet Omar Sharif, the spectacular Claudia Cardinale. Of course, this is no longer a shot of the characters caught in the naughty moments, but parade black-and-white staged shots, enlivened, however, by mild irony and light teasing of the actors, many of whom have become Tazio’s pals. Sechiaroli was present behind the scenes of many of the most famous directors’ films: Blow up and Cleopatra, 8½ and Rome, City of Women and Sunflowers. Shots from the set of the latter are especially interesting for a domestic viewer: they were filmed in the USSR. Lauren, wearing makeup and well-dressed, looks great in Red Square Ilya Glazunov says something to Juliette Mazina, who is clearly but politely perplexed by the “American Icarus” the coy and envious looks of Soviet women tortured by the commodity shortage, are portrayed amusingly and with a kind of undercurrent of pity. Here, of course, one is tempted to make comparisons with the New York shoots of other filmmakers-Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Norman Parkinson. Secchiaroli shots are not without wit and observation, but with the same detachment, without Bressonian piercing or Parkinsonian warmth. He is more of a tourist, a friendly collector of images than a researcher of life and other people’s affects, subtly grasping in any staged or reportage shot a funny or glossy moment, but that’s about it.

Sechiaroli and his colleagues at one time laid the foundations for the two main genres upon which the glossy industry still relies to this day, seemingly opposed, but in fact merging in a strange unity, where the “approved” narrative about the gala side of a star’s life and the undercover, secretly filmed side of glamour are often indistinguishable from each other. Curiously enough, many of the peculiarities of working with the image of Sequiaroli, who retired from “big picture” in 1983 and from life in 1998, seem to be in demand right now. They are even more in demand than the subtler and deeper reportages, or the “star” portraits of the other photographers of the era, like Bresson and Parkinson, mentioned in this article. Thus, two paradoxically connected qualities of his photography, two sides of the same coin – the ability to violate other people’s space and to glide easily over the surface of the image – lead directly not only to glossy journalism, but also, for example, to modern “emotional”, pseudo documentary photography, seemingly the opposite of paparazzi work. Photography which tries to show what emotions the people around them are experiencing, to expose their secret thoughts, but which more often than not only fixes the projections of their author’s inner world. Just recently, a photographer who studied under me told me that a certain venerable contemporary author, working at the interface of contemporary art, pointed out to her that she was “too sorry” for her elderly relative, about whom her photo project was made: too little intrudes into her world, with too much respect for her personal boundaries. But the parallel is not quite right because the “first paparazzi,” unceremoniously coming into the characters’ real lives and trying to catch them in the act of sin, never violated the wholeness of their inner world, never dissected it with a scalpel in his hands, instead treating them, oddly enough, with a certain humanity and care. Perhaps these beautiful, somewhat apt and interesting, but seemingly slightly hollow shots of the “little man” so obviously tired of struggling with life can give today’s photographers who have lost confidence in the concept of “reality of the world around them,” but for some reason rarely question the real value of their personal gaze some hints as to where to draw the line between their own fantasies about what their characters feel, and real attention to the world of other people around them.

Thanks to Agana Management Company, ZPIF Sobranie.Photo Effect, Tazio Secchiaroli Foundation, INFINITUM specialized depository and personally Anatoly Zlobovsky for the photos provided for publication.

Richard Avedon and Sophia Loren. 1966

From the series “The Private Life of Sophia Loren”

Sophia Loren on the set of “Sunflowers”. USSR, 1969

Marcello Mastroianni and Federico Fellini on the set of the film “City of Women. 1979 g.

Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroiani on the set of 8 1/2. 1963

Sophia Loren and her son. From “The Private Life of Sophia Loren” series

The filming of “Miss Italia.”. Rome, 1950s

Sophia Loren. “The Countess from Hong Kong.”. 1966

Federico Fellini on the set of the film “8 ½”. 1963

Marcello Mastroianni on the set of “8½”. 1963

Federico Fellini on the set of the film “8½”. 1963

Aishe Nana striptease in Rugantino. Rome, 1958