Tazio Secchiaroli

The first paparazzi

Tazio Secchiaroli is generally considered the first ‘paparazzo’ (Italian for a persistent, perpetually buzzing mosquito). Paparazzi photographers were notorious for pursuing celebrities in their quest for ‘sensational’ candid shots, although this type of photography actually existed prior to Secchiaroli in the USA, France, Germany and other countries. With his early experience as a young street photographer hungry to make a living, Tazio Secchiaroli developed superior paparazzi skills — the know-how required to infiltrate his subjects’ lives, to predict and foresee the movements and actions he subsequently captured with his camera. The ability to perceive, sense and catch the intangible on film brought Fellini and Tazio together. It was due to the genius of Fellini, the maestro, that Tazio Secchiaroli gained further recognition and created the new photography of cinema. Fellini discovered Secchiaroli, Secchiaroli opened up Fellini for us and Fellini revealed his specific and very Italian view of life to the wider world. Tazio documented Italian movie stars and depicted the ‘essence’ of Italian cinema, the spirit of Fellini. The skill and talent that allowed him to identify with his models and convey in a photograph the essence of whatever he portrayed — the emotions, movement, aesthetics, beauty and life that was never-ending yet also composed of fleeting moments — defined the next few decades of Secchiaroli’s creative career. When he felt that this divine art had taken all his strength for its own he left us, in the way great men are destined to leave… Tazio Secchiaroli was born in 1925, in the outskirts of Rome. He first took up photography in 1944, one of the innumerable itinerant photographers pacing the streets of postwar Rome. Secchiaroli took shots of American soldiers, then of wide-eyed tourists. This energetic, resourceful and keen-eyed young man benefited from his experience ‘on the street’, and in 1951 he joined an agency belonging to Adolfo Porry-Pastorel, one of the founders of Italian photojournalism. Pastorel had plenty to teach the young photographer. Secchiaroli set up the Roma Press Photos agency together with Sergio Spinelli in 1955 and worked there for three years as a reporter, recording some of the most sensational and compelling moments in Italian life. He began his collaboration with Federico Fellini in 1958. After release of the film ‘La Dolce Vita’ (1960) Secchiaroli directed his attention to studio photography and became Sophia Loren’s personal photographer for the next twenty years. In 1983 he ‘retired from photography’. Tazio Secchiaroli passed away in his sleep during the night of July 23rd to 24th 1998, at his home in Rome.