“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tangle by offering the lens to its subjects, and the infamous paparazzi scuffles of old had partly been replaced by copyright-law battles when celebrities posted uncredited photos of themselves.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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