crack'e' pa D
We know the paparazzi are evil but we just can’t get enough of their work. Matthew Magee wonders whether a little self-loathing is a good thing.
ow many other professions have the privilege of
being turned into a verb'.’ Ask any Hear-reading
nine-year-old what it means to 'be papped’ and they will sneer at your media illiteracy. But though they are as much part of the fabric of modern life as mobile phones and fake tan. paparazzi are hated and reviled by all around them. held up as the ultimate sleazebags and cheats. Yet millions of people buy their work every day. Why'.’ Because paps are our representatives on Planet
Celeb. puncturing egos and pricking bubbles of
impenetrable media management.
The most valuable snaps are of the most controlling. paranoid celebs. which is why the Beckhams are. in part. authors of their own curse. Punters want reality. tinged with a little bit of wealth—envy revenge. This is the grubby but gorgeous gift the paparazzi gives to the world. We live in an age of unprecedented image management. A minder’s main concern is no longer to protect the bodies of their charges from assailants but to protect their images from being tarnished by associations that would damage the clients’ saleability. This is less an issue of invasion of privacy than it is an issue of marketability. an issue of cold. hard cash.
Nobody would claim that having paps camped outside your door is particularly pleasant. and for ordinary people caught up in extraordinary situations not of their making. your sympathies have to lie with the poor punter. This is not the situation most celebs find themselves in. though. At worst there are a few snappers lurking at the end of your ludicrously long driveway who will meekly follow your car when you go shopping. lltnnan rights abuse it ain‘t.
It is no accident that paparazzi photography came into being in the last great age of image manipulation. the 1950s golden years of the Hollywood studios. Robert Harrison was getting nowhere in his bid to become a standard press photographer. All-powerful studio publicists would ignore him so he hired freelance photographers to stalk celebrities and get candid pictures of them in tin-managed. tin—scripted and un- controlled situations which he published in his new
magazine. ('oii/irlwitiul. Harrison was driven out of
business by lawsuits but his techniques gained a more
solid foothold through (‘lA-man (ieneroso Pope Jr
when he built a mult-million dollar empire out of the idea with his .«Vulionu/ lz'nquirw' supermarket tabloid. What followed was largely an American phenomenon of snapping celebs out and about. but it began to creep into British tabloids when celebs were caught doing things that they really ought not to have been doing: John Leslie snorting cocaine. (iazza guzzling kebabs before big games. the lingland team in the ‘dentist‘s
chair" cocktail mixer; the list is tawdry and shameful for
10 THE LIST ‘7 7", Ma, Qtilif)
WE WANT A SLICE 0F SCHADEN TO ADD TO THE SEEMINGLY ENDLESS
F REUDE OF THE CELEB
them and endlesst exciting for us. That quickly developed into something altogether more mundane when Heal. Now and (Josef arrived. Shots of celebs as minor as Sadie Frost taking children to the shops attracted big money and paparazzi saturation point was reached.
But why do we care'.’ Why do we fork out for such banality? We care because we are sick of being had. tired of being sold jeans and perfume and trainers by association with celebrity marriages that are as brittle as the fake nails holding the carefully placed product. Hm! et al emerged. tellingly. just at the moment when celeb-pandering gush-mags ()K and Hello! seemed to be at their airbrushed. fawning peak. It was an antidote that was sorely needed. Yet still we demonise the snappers who feed our addiction. Really. we are just hating the part of ourselves that can‘t help catching an eyeful of a starlet's cellulite or a footballer“s bloodied nose. We know it's wrong but we don't need to berate ourselves when we can hate the vicious. parasitical paps instead. It‘s easier that way.
We seem to have an insatiable need for celeb pies and gossip. In part. it‘s because we spend more hours longer working and less time at home. The community of celebrities is increasingly. replacing the geographical communities around our front door. We people our lives with celebs that we feel we know instead of acquaintances that we actually do know. We need paps because we want to see past the controlled storybook images that govern our relationships with those celebs. We also want a little bit of revenge. a slice of schaden to add to the seemingly endless freude of the rich. pampered celeb. Yes it's mean. yes it demeans us. but it is also fun. And it is real. Just look at the sales figures for Hm! and The Sun. You know you‘ve bought them. and deep down you know why. Paparazzi are just the ones brave enough to admit it and make a couple of quid.
y, "it: .,;
MY? FAVOURITE
t it"; i ii.
R f i)’ U 51 if) I N ('1
S( Oil Ali}?
As part of our 100 Best Scottish Books campaign, we invite public figures to nominate their own personal choices.
MARK COUSINS, FILM PRODUCER I'm hooked on Rebuilding Scotland: The Postwar Vision. edited by Miles Glendinning. l have always loved Le Corbusier's conception of modernism and Scotland has many buildings inspired by him. Qtiite often l‘ll drive to East Kilbride, Cumbernauld. Cardross or Lasswade to try to find some of these. Their architects — lsi Metzstein and Andy MacMillan at Gillespie. Kidd and Coia. Morris and Steedman, Basil Spence and others — are enormously powerful figures for me. Sometimes I get lost on these drives, but always I have my copy of Rebuilding Scotland on the passenger seat, with its page open at the photograph of the building I'm looking for. Often it‘s no longer there. because times have changed or it was no good in the first place. in which case Glendinning's book becomes more exciting. It conjures the idea of the building or shows it when it was in good repair and people were more optimistic about social justice. Rebuilding Scotland is about a dream in Scottish architecture which went partially wrong. The failures damaged communities. I think, and were sometimes cynical. but not always. It's the modernin of Scotland that I love and this book is brave enough to champion that modernity. I To vote for your favourite Scottish book, text the word ‘VO TE ' and the name of the book to 87800. The Winner Will be announced in August.