It all started in…well, it’s pretty difficult to pin down a specific point where it all started. It could have been in 1800, when Thomas Wedgewood was the first to produce an image by exposing paper treated with silver nitrate to light. Or maybe it was George Eastman, who patented the the “roll of film” that could be loaded into a camera, and then founded the Eastman Kodak company. It might even have been Ernst Leitz, who founded the Leica camera company in 1914 — the Leica was one of the first 35-mm cameras to be both portable and reliable, and was the tool of choice among “street photographers.”
The most direct link, though, to an origin story for “paparazzi” (did I mention that’s today’s word?) is probably about Tazio Secchiaroli (1925-1998). It’s also the best story. It starts in the 1950s. Secchiaroli was a freelance photographer in Rome who sold photos of famous people to magazines. The photos were posed, but the magazine editors were getting bored with the whole idea. One posed photo of an actor or actress starts to look pretty much like the last one after a while, after all. Secchiaroli, like others doing the same thing, was known as a “street photographer.”
Then one night in 1958, King Farouk of Egypt was visiting Rome, and went to dinner at a sidewalk cafe. Secchiaroli was there, either because of Farouk, or because a famous actor (Anthony Steele) and actress (Anita Ekberg) were at the cafe too. Then it happened. For some reason the king flew into a rage and flipped his table over. Anthony Steele was right there, quite upset. Anita Ekberg was waiting for Steele in the car, just a few feet away. Completely by coincidence, Secchiaroli took a photo that captured the whole incident, including all the famous individuals. He sold the photo for top dollar, and possibly to his surprise, he got pretty famous himself because of it.
It got really interesting when Frederico Fellini, the film director, saw the photo in a magazine. At the time, he was working on the plot of a new movie about Rome and the celebrities who seemed to be visiting it in large numbers of late. Fellini contacted Secchiaroli to find out more about celebrities in Rome, and when his new film (La Dolce Vita) came out in 1960, there was a character who’s a street photographer. Fellini came up with the character after talking to Secchiaroli. Fellini named the character “Paparazzo,” because, he said, the word reminded him of “a buzzing insect, hovering, darting, stinging.”
The film was a big hit. Secciaroli got even more famous. And street photographers like him in real life, now modeled after the movie role that was modeled after him, became known as “paparazzi.”
But wait — that might not be the real origin story. The word “paparazzi” did get popularized in that movie, but there’s another story about where it came from. This one comes from Ennio Flaiano, one of the scriptwriters for La Dolce Vita. Around the turn of the century, George Gissing (English travel author) traveled around southern Italy and wrote about it in his 1901 book By the Ionian Sea. Gissing’s books were enjoying a revival in the 1950s, and Faiano read that one, including a report about the Albergo Centrale hotel, where Gissing stayed while visiting Catanzaro. The hotel was run by Coriolano Paparazzo. Flaiano wrote in his diary that he borrowed the name “Paparazzo” from Gissing’s book and used it in the script he was working on.
The second story isn’t quite as compelling as Fellini’s, but it does have some weight behind it. If you visit Catanzaro, the Albergo Centrale is still there (at least the building is), and there’s a commemorative plaque that tells the story of Gissing’s visit, the book, and Flaiano’s use of the name in the Fellini’s movie script. So even though we’re not sure which story is the real origin of “paparazzi,” my advice is to book a ticket for southern Italy and check it out yourself. And bring your camera; you never know who you’re going to see having a tantrum in a sidewalk cafe.
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