The Thousands

The celebrity machine runs on shamelessness. Greasing the wheels are the especially shameless paparazzi… and pioneering pap Ron Galella is pathologically shameless. Leon Gast’s documentary reveals what might happen if Austin Visschedyk, the cherubic snapper from Adrian Grenier’s Teenage Paparazzo, lived his entire life down the rabbit hole of his lens.

Bronx-born, New Jersey-based Galella thrived on the cat-and-mouse games his profession requires. Jackie Onassis was his unwilling muse (she directed her Secret Service bodyguards to “smash his camera”), leading to multiple lawsuits, which Jackie won. Marlon Brando broke his jaw with a single punch. Undeterred, Galella continued to photograph Brando, wearing a gridiron helmet.

Gast airs the moral issues, but ultimately finds poignancy in the now 77-year-old photographer. No longer capable of springing from bushes, he mines his huge archive for books and exhibitions. “The gold is in the files,” he says. Despite his recent embrace by the art world, Galella’s real artistry lies in tenacious pursuit – the photos are just the evidence. And one devastating scene, in which a twentysomething chick artlessly fails to recognise the celebs in Galella’s old shots, underscores that while his work has captured moments, his own moment has passed.