Ron Galella

Ron Galella (January 10, 1931 – April 30, 2022) was born in the Bronx, New York, the son of an Italian immigrant cabinetmaker and a Hollywood-obsessed mother who named him after a movie star. That tension between the working class and the glamorous defined everything that came after. Dubbed “Paparazzo Extraordinaire” by Newsweek and “the Godfather of U.S. Paparazzi Culture” by Time and Vanity Fair, Galella spent nearly six decades doing something no studio photographer could: catching the most famous people on earth in the moments they weren’t performing.

He trained as a photographer in the United States Air Force, earned his degree in photojournalism from the ArtCenter College of Design in 1958, and returned to New York with a darkroom in his father’s basement and the streets of Manhattan as his studio. What followed was a career of relentless, singular pursuit: Jackie Onassis through Central Park, Marlon Brando through Chinatown, Andy Warhol through the rooms of Studio 54. The archive now numbers in the millions of images and spans every major figure of the twentieth century.

His most famous photograph, Windblown Jackie, was taken on October 7, 1971, on Madison Avenue after he flagged a taxi and the driver honked the horn. Time magazine named it one of the most influential photographs of all time in 2016, forty-five years after he took it. What tabloids once bought for a thousand dollars a frame, MoMA, the Tate Modern, SFMOMA, and the Helmut Newton Foundation eventually placed in their permanent collections.

His 22 published books, including Disco Years, named Best Photography Book of 2006 by The New York Times, document not just celebrities but an entire lost era of unmanaged, unfiltered fame. Andy Warhol called him his favorite photographer. Michael Kors coined the phrase “Galella Glamour” as a design reference point. The 2010 Sundance Grand Jury Award-winning documentary Smash His Camera introduced him to an entirely new generation as an artist who understood something essential about the relationship between fame, image, and time.