“There’s just too much emotion and sadness right now to even think about going out to find celebrities. “I already heard about two press photographers last week that had tested positive and were both hospitalized,” Steffman said. A few paparazzi said distancing was impossible in their particular corner of the industry others said they risked it on occasion. Some celebrity-chasing continues, especially in L.A., where, some photographers said, they tend to get closer to their subjects than in New York. “So social distancing doesn’t really change the approach in terms of how celebrity photographers are shooting during the pandemic.” “True paparazzi work has always required us to shoot from a good distance to stay hidden,” Steffman said. or the Hamptons instead of swanky downtown hotels,” he said.
“Celebs are sheltered in their homes in L.A. Miles Diggs has attracted attention in the past for his #positivepaps ethos, but has had trouble finding subjects in New York lately. “Since I work in the city, I didn’t want to risk getting infected and coming home to my family and getting them sick too,” he said. Felipe Ramales, who said he got the first photos of Katie Holmes and Jamie Foxx in Central Park last year-there were “a few paparazzis at Katie’s house, but they were not paying attention”-mostly hasn’t worked since the coronavirus spread to New York City. Opinion varied among paparazzi between concern for their health if they do shoot and insistence that successful work in their field is socially distanced by nature. That “has decreased to about 500 almost overnight.” The agency calls itself the “Hollywood Hunt Club” and says “it is an anthology of the habits and mores of a small class of rich people in Southern California.” “We normally produce between five to seven thousand images a month,” Randy Bauer, cofounder of the Los Angeles paparazzi agency Bauer-Griffin, said. It was “already a tough business before all this happened,” one paparazzo said, “and now all I can say is all got worse these days.” Income “dropped to one from 10,” said another. Some of them asked not to be identified, often because they wanted to maintain a low profile in a contentious line of work. Many of the paparazzi interviewed for this story said they were trying to self-isolate as much as they could while continuing to make some money, and that’s in part why the tabloid photography well hasn’t gone totally dry. The shifting norms have become somewhat clearer in recent years-last week Kim Kardashian West credited the photo agency Splash News on a new Instagram post of herself walking into a car-but by and large the field remains a fading business. The rich and famous can get into trouble all by themselves: Ellen DeGeneres recently compared her lavish home to a prison, David Geffen took a hint and got off Instagram after posting about his yacht bliss, and the “Imagine” video was recorded.īefore the pandemic, Instagram had already torn at the knotty celebrity-paparazzi-tabloid tangle by offering the lens to its subjects, and the infamous paparazzi scuffles of old had partly been replaced by copyright-law battles when celebrities posted uncredited photos of themselves. And even now, when celebrity resentment is reaching a crescendo and the paparazzi’s hostile tendencies might be more welcome, they haven’t always been needed.
In boom times for paparazzi, they were a recurring cause for ire and conflict. And celebrities, not quite essential workers, have means and reason to self-isolate from the camera-less safety of their homes. The film sets where actors typically don’t want to be captured-where something like Ben Affleck’s sprawling back tattoo might be unveiled to the public for the first time-aren’t operational at the moment.
“My calendar got completely wiped out in a week,” said celebrity-event photographer Jen Lowery. He’s been staying indoors for the past few weeks, as have some of his peers. One “check went from $2,000 a month with minimal work to $200 last month in March,” Rivera said, adding that he’d bought his flight for the postponed Met gala, his main source of income for the year, on February 26.
Everything was detailed well and the composition of the photo is amazing.” He’s passionate about the subject too, and he described his thrill in getting a shot of Justin Bieber in a fur coat: “This moment was too iconic because I knew that this coat would be one for the books. “Last year I purchased my own home because of my success with paparazzi,” Rivera wrote in an email. It was a mercurial field, celebrity schedules shifting as they do, but he found that it was a profitable one. Before the coronavirus spread across the United States, Vicente Cain Rivera had a busy career as a paparazzo, tracking and shooting the Biebers, Jenners, and Hadids as they stepped out in Los Angeles.
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