Wednesday, September 24, 2008

No photos, no photos

Happy Birthday to me!  That's right, and this year was a big birthday too, though I'm not telling you which one.  A lady never tells.

The greatest gift of all was, of course, sipping French 75s with friends and family, and shooting many games of billiards, during which the skill level exhibited did nothing to justify the level of photographic documentation that followed.

That being said, one of my other favorite gifts of the night was a book of Ron Galella's photographs.  Galella was one of the most famous paparrazi photographers of the last half of the century, and his photos stand alone as art as well as documentation of the celebrity culture of the 60s and 70s.  He shot many photos of icons such as Jackie Onassis, Marlon Brando and Andy Warhol, as well as incredibly evocative portraits from the disco scene.

His photographic style has come to be so inextricably linked to the scene he inhabited, that it becomes hard to tell where the journalism ends and the history-making begins.





cheers!
Gillian


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