Flashgun warrior
Tazio Secchiaroli was an ingenious hit-and-run snapper - the first paparazzo - who 40-odd years ago inspired Fellini's La Dolce Vita. He moved on to become a great portraitist and set photographer, but the style he had pioneered swept the world. By Gaby Wood
Fri 16 Jul 1999 20.11 EDT
It all began in Italy in 1958. On August 19, the Italian newspaper, Il Giorno, ran a story on its front page with the headline "Photographer Attacked By Farouk and Franciosa". It was big news: photo-reporters had been around for a while, but this was different. Now their targets - celebrities - were biting back. The word "paparazzi" did not yet exist, but their era was about to begin. The most feared of the new breed was Tazio Secchiaroli.
That Friday night, Il Giorno reported, ex-King Farouk of Egypt had turned on a group of photographers on Rome's via Veneto and hurled himself at Secchiaroli, their ring-leader. The pack then ran off: they'd been given a tip-off that Ava Gardner was on her way to a nightclub. Anthony Franciosa, "the current leading man in Ava's fickle heart", as the paper put it, was the second man that night to attack Secchiaroli when he set off his flash. The rest of the reporters stood by and snapped. The next day their pictures were everywhere. Secchiaroli had found fame: he was the author and subject of a new kind of stunt.
The film-maker Federico Fellini was with the photographers that night - watching them at work, chatting to Secchiaroli and his friend Pierluigi Praturlon, hanging out in the via Veneto and collecting material for his new film. Fellini had wanted to make a movie about bohemian Rome, but found it had changed - the artists were no longer there. "Today," he reflected in 1958, "there is journalism, photo-reporters, motorisation, the branch of cafe society." And so, with his screenwriters Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli, he tried to create something that reflected the city as it suddenly was.
The Rome they encountered was a gossip- and celebrity-led free-for-all. The poverty of the immediate post-war period was over, the censorious Pope was dead, and Americans were flooding the city. There was a financial crisis in Hollywood, and a number of productions were made at Cinecittˆ, where the labour was cheaper and the stars could dodge their US taxes. Ava Gardner came to film The Barefoot Contessa, and Anita Ekberg was involved in a cheap pan-European production felicitously named Sign Of The Gladiator. (When Fellini first saw Ekberg, he experienced "the incredulity one has before creatures of exceptional height, like the giraffe or the elephant". Marcello Mastroianni said she reminded him of a Nazi soldier who had arrested him during the war.)
Thousands of young girls came to the city to be "discovered", and soon Rome was dubbed "Hollywood on the Tiber". At its hub was the via Veneto, where the scoop-chasing photographers and scandal sheets reigned. Flaiano wrote that it had "become one big party É this isn't a street any more, it's a beach É the conversations are like those at the seaside, referring to an exclusively gastro-sexual reality".
The film Fellini made out of all this was La Dolce Vita, and those three words have since become indelibly associated with the louche, glittering hedonism the movie depicts. There was another word Fellini coined in that film: "paparazzo". It had never been used before, and it caught on.
The word comes from the name given to the character in La Dolce Vita played by Walter Santesso - the cameraman and inseparable sidekick of the hack played by Mastroianni. Many origins have been offered for it. Fellini said it was the name of a character in an opera. Flaiano claims to have got it from George Gissing's travel book of 1909, By The Ionian Sea (the book came out in an Italian translation around the time they were preparing La Dolce Vita). In any case, the Italian suffix "-azzo" generally adds a pejorative edge to a word. "Paparazzo" is also a surname, and possibly derives from the word "papataceo", a large type of mosquito. But, as Flaiano said, "names have their own destinies".
In the film, as, apparently, in life, the photo-graphers come together like a swarm of flies and follow people, surrounding them, attacking them with their flashes. Fellini drew a sketch to show how he saw Santesso. A figure, in an exaggerated tiptoeing pose that suggests something between a burglar and a bullfighter, holds a camera high above his head. Lightning flashes are shooting out of it, electrifying the space before him.
In one scene in La Dolce Vita, the photo-graphers gather in wait for a woman who, it turns out, does not yet know of her husband's suicide. "No!" she cries, slightly flattered, shooing them away. "You must have mistaken me for someone else. I'm not famous". In fact, she is - before she even knows what for. As the police drive her away, the photographers disperse. Paparazzo walks towards us, into the lens of the movie camera, until he is a blur and his own camera lens, hanging against his chest, takes up the screen. It is the last we see of him. Fellini explained that he wanted to show by this how "our soulless photographer" was "more of a camera than a man".
The man on whom much of that character was based was Tazio Secchiaroli - it was even rumoured that he might be hired to play himself. He was known as an urban fox, the Volpe di via Veneto. He pioneered the punch-up style of that post-war period, and had an impeccable background in artful dodges. During the war, he took to photo-graphing soldiers and tourists in the street, hoping they would buy the picture as a souvenir. Later, he was taken on by an agency as an assistant.
Something of his early training can be gleaned from the stunts pulled by his mentor, the photojournalist Adolfo Porry-Pastorel, who ran the VEDO agency. On one occasion, Hitler visited Naples to review the Italian fleet, and a group of five journalists, including Porry-Pastorel, were sent on the 24-hour trip. Since they were travelling together, the other photographers assumed that their photos would be printed simultaneously. But Porry-Pastorel, who used a Leica when they were all still using plates, had smuggled 20 homing pigeons on board: 10 from Rome and 10 from Naples. In the afternoon, he said he felt ill, developed his negatives in his cabin, and attached one to each of the pigeons. By the time the press trip returned, Porry- Pastorel's pictures were in all the papers.
Secchiaroli was the son of a bricklayer, born, in 1925, in the countryside outside Rome. The photographs he and his contemporaries produced were a direct result both of their backgrounds and their equipment. It was a technique all their own, and of its time: because they all used twin-lens Rolleiflexes, they had to come right up close to their subjects and flash in their faces. Since the flashes on those cameras took a long time to recharge from a heavy battery which had to be carried like a bag over the shoulder, the photographers had only one chance for a shot. Until 1956, when the Fiat 600 was put on the market, photographers had Lambrettas or Vespas (photographers' assistants, in those days, were people who drove them around on scooters so they could shoot pictures from the back seat). The photos that resulted were swift and brash.
"For me," Secchiaroli said later, "photo-graphy was only movement, action, a fast, instinctive thing." He likened himself to a paratrooper and the via Veneto to "a theatre of war". "We'll fight with flashes," he proclaimed. The paparazzi were criticised by the posher, more formal photographers, who believed photographs should be used as political tools, but this new aesthetic was entirely characteristic of the working class who created it. It was more about making do and getting by than about the beauty or import of the image.
The photographers found that they could earn more from scenes of provocation than by standard reportage, so they began to engineer "incidents". The magazines paid L3,000 for a straight shot and L200,000 for an enraged celebrity. Meanwhile, the stars cottoned on to the fact that they were more likely to have their picture in the paper if they were "caught" on camera, and they began to tell the reporters their whereabouts in advance, so that they could be "surprised".
Thirty years later Fellini wrote, "I think the inspiration [for his film], even in terms of the formulation of the images, came from life as seen by the scandal sheets, L'Europeo, Oggi; the careless jaunts of the corrupt aristocracy, their way of photographing parties. The scandal sheets were the worrying mirror of a society that was in a constant state of self-celebration, self-depiction, self- congratulation." The photographers influenced him, not just in terms of the culture they represented and the images they disseminated, but in the content of his film. "Let's invent episodes," he told his collaborators, "let's not worry for now about the logic or the narrative." He sketched relentlessly, pooling what he saw in fashion pages and scandal sheets with what he observed in the streets. Image took precedence over story line: when Anita Ekberg signed the contract to appear in the film, Fellini told her there was no script for her to read.
He based scenes on reported events, on widely-known gossip - Secchiaroli and his companions, you might say, inadvertently storyboarded La Dolce Vita. Supposedly fictional, it contained a number of instantly recognisable images. The opening scene - in which a statue of Christ is carried by helicopter over the city to the Vatican - was taken from a photograph which appeared in Roman papers in May 1950. In the film, Marcello and Paparazzo are in another helicopter, flying behind it, covering the story.
Secchiaroli's "paparazzo" pictures of Anita Ekberg and her drunken husband Anthony Steel were famous (Ekberg was cast in La Dolce Vita to play, more or less, herself). In the film, there is a fight based on them. When Marcello takes "Sylvia" back to her hotel, he finds the snappers buzzing around her boyfriend, who has passed out in his car. The boyfriend (played by Lex Barker, who looked like Steel and played the same sorts of roles) wakes up, slaps her and punches Marcello. The snappers are in clover.
They have so much to shoot they don't know whether to focus on the attacker or the attacked. Their flashes run out mid-brawl. Ekberg storms into the hotel, but all you can hear on the soundtrack are the tapping footsteps of the snappers chasing her. Ekberg and Steel got divorced that year.
The fey, middle-class orgy at the end of La Dolce Vita was based on a famous impromptu striptease at a club called Rugantino's in November 1958. Ekberg, as it happens, was there. Among the crowd was a Turkish dancer called Aiche Nana, who was lured into doing a belly-dance and took her clothes off. A number of photo-graphers caught her on film, but Secchiaroli's shots were the ones syndicated all over the world because only he had photo-graphed the audience as well. It was this disjunction, the chic and the cheap, that was shocking. Fellini admitted that this was his blueprint, since he had no other source of information: "Thinking that Pasolini was well versed in orgies, I invited him for dinner one night," he wrote. "But Pier Paolo told me straight away that he was sorry but he didn't know anything about bourgeois orgies, he'd never taken part in one."
Perhaps the most famous image from the film is Ekberg in the Trevi fountain, and that was stolen, too - from Pierluigi Praturlon, the man who would later become, in a strangely topsy-turvy gesture, La Dolce Vita's set photographer. Ekberg remembered the occasion: "One night I was having photos taken by Pierluigi Praturlon. I was barefoot and I cut my foot. I went in search of a fountain to bathe my bleeding foot and, all unawares, found myself in the piazza di Trevi. It was summer. I was wearing a white-and-pink cotton dress with the upper part like a man's shirt. I lifted the skirt up and immersed myself in the basin, saying to Luigi, 'You can't imagine how cool this water is, you should come in, too.' 'Just stay like that,' he said, and started taking photos. They sold like hot cakes É It was me who made Fellini famous," she concluded, "not the other way around."
La Dolce Vita could be seen to be all about images, how and when they lodge in the mind. Which was real? Which was rigged? Which was only a movie? When Fellini tried filming in the via Veneto, for example, he found it impossible. Instead, he asked the film's designer, Piero Gherardi, to build a copy at Cinecittˆ. From the moment the fictional street was built, the director remembered, "Cinecittˆ replaced the world for me."
It also replaced, or became, Secchiaroli's world. As a teenager, he had worked as a gofer at Cinecittˆ. Though that was short-lived, the movies continued to fascinate him. After La Dolce Vita was released, he gave up the paparazzo life and became, predominantly, a set photographer. For 20 years he took portraits of Sophia Loren, accompanying her everywhere, turning her into an icon. He learned the patience that would have destroyed him as a paparazzo, and gave up the glare of the scandal shot for a more intimate, crafted style. On the set of Godard's Contempt, he took a picture of Brigitte Bardot during a break in filming. She is smoking, pouting, wearing a black wig and sitting on the loo. The irony can't have been lost on Secchiaroli: never in his "flash age" days could he have pulled off such an invasion of privacy.
He was employed mostly by Fellini, who trusted his eye implicitly. When they met, Secchiaroli's pictures were the basis of a film; later, they became the record of a film. But they were more than just that: his photos of Fellini's 81/2 so match the style of the movie that it's hard to tell if they were documenting it or inspiring it. Just six years after La Dolce Vita, Secchiaroli was hired to take pictures on the set of Antonioni's Blow-Up: a film about a photographer. In that short space of time, the nature of photo-graphy had changed. The 60s were in full swing, and a new generation of photo- graphers - David Bailey, Terence Donovan - had become celebrities. The entire plot of Blow-Up rests on a technical effect: on photographing something in the distance, which can be blown up again and again to reveal a clue. The paparazzi, meanwhile - now called by that name all over the world - had taken up their telephoto lenses. These were less literally in your face; the game had changed to one of surveillance, of never knowing when you might be watched. The stakes in that game have become higher and more dangerous, but one imagines that Secchiaroli, who died last year, never meant that, for all his blatant, clumsy methods. He was just out to capture a mood, to snatch a piece of la dolce vita. n
Tazio Secchiaroli: Greatest of the Paparazzi, by Diego Mormorio, published by Abrams at £32, can be ordered through the Guardian at the special price of £28, plus 99p p&p, by calling 0500 600102, or by sending a cheque to Culture-Shop, 250 Western Avenue, London W3 6EE.