Just in case you missed yesterday's Guardian magazine, there was an excellent piece by Decca Aitkenhead on "the explosion of paparazzi since the boom in digital cameras and celebrity magazines". Excellent because she manages to explain "the game" of snapping celebrities from the inside, even to the point of becoming "a player" herself.
She ends up stalking Amy Winehouse, realising that what she experiences "is precisely the same emotional spectrum every pap describes: predatory adrenaline rush, horrified shame, professional dissociation."
Once she confronts Winehouse in a shop, "her pale, white face... streaked with tears", the objectified celeb "becomes a real person", a real person clearly in need of psychological help.
Aitkenhead writes: "I want to tell her, I'm just doing my job. 'I'm not following you, Amy!' I start to say - I'm from the Guardian, you see, and I'm following the paparazzi, and they're following you, and so now it looks like I'm following you, but actually I'm just doing my job. I open my mouth to say it - but then I stop. This is what all the paps say: I'm just doing my job."
Just doing my job. How often did photographers tell me that during the Princess Diana years? I'm also reminded of a further justification when Aitkenhead talks to a snapper who refuses to give his name "because he says he gets enough grief in his job as it is".
He tells her: "We're just a bunch of guys trying to get the photographs... The people who buy the magazines and want to see these photographs, they're the fucked-up ones."
There it is. The true face of the stalkerazzi. At the bottom of what Aitkenhead properly describes as "the publicity food chain", they are simply giving the people what they want. It's a dirty job but someone's got to do it, eh?
In fact, as the article makes very clear, it's a boring, ultimately worthless, job that anyone can do and, it appears, anyone is doing it. And I love the way they blame everyone except themselves for the way the pack acts, claiming - against all historic evidence to the contrary - that it was once an honourable profession.
"There's no respect," one photographer tells Aitkenhead. "There used to be an etiquette about getting your pictures, and it wasn't to rush at the celebs. But there are too many guys now, and people don't know. They're not photographers, they're just people with cameras."
Used to be an etiquette? When was that precisely? In 1997, perhaps, in a Paris underpass?
