Ron Galella was born in the United States in 1931. American pho­tog­ra­pher, he is now rec­og­nized world­wide as a pio­neer of paparazzi photography.

Much has been writ­ten about Ron Galella. Considered the most famous and con­tro­ver­sial celebrity pho­tog­ra­pher, he was dubbed “Paparazzi Extraordinary” by Newsweek and “The US Godfather of Paparazzi Culture” by Time and Vanity Fair.

Galella is will­ing to take sig­nif­i­cant risks to get the per­fect shot. Which earned him, among other things, two high-​profile court bat­tles with Jacqueline Kennedy-​Onassis, a bro­ken jaw at the hands of Marlon Brando and a beat­ing by Richard Burton’s body­guards before being impris­oned in Cuernavaca, Mexico…

But ulti­mately it was his pas­sion for the art of pho­tog­ra­phy com­bined with his self-​taught approach that shaped his craft – few artists can claim such a level of tech­ni­cal skill in mak­ing their own prints – as demon­strated by his work exhib­ited in many muse­ums and gal­leries around the world such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and San Francisco, the Tate Moderne in London and the Helmut Newton Foundation Museum of Photography in Berlin.

Ron Galella’s pho­tos have appeared in hun­dreds of mag­a­zines, includ­ing Time, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Vanity Fair, People, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and The New York Times. But Ron’s pas­sion for pho­to­jour­nal­ism has also resulted in many highly regarded books such as Disco Years which was awarded “Best Photo Book of 2006” by The New York Times.

Smash His Camera, the doc­u­men­tary about his life and career, directed by Oscar-​winning direc­tor, Léon Gast, (When we Were Kings, 1996) which opened the Sundance Film Festival, received the Price of the Grand Jury in the cat­e­gory “Best Documentary Film Director”. This film was then broad­cast on the BBC and then through­out Europe.

Apart from the recog­ni­tion he acquired at home in the USA, the gov­ern­ment of the Region of Basilicata in Italy granted Ron, whose father, Vincenzo Galella, was born in Muro Lucano, the title of “Honorary Citizen of the Region in 2009”. Ron then pub­lished Viva l’Italia!, a book of more than 225 images of Italian and Italian-​American celebri­ties, from Frank Sinatra to Sophia Loren.

Ron Galella died in 2022 at his home in Montville, New Jersey.