How easy can it be for citizen paparazzi?

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By Ravi Somaiya (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-07-23 07:30

You are as likely to be without a means of taking pictures - whether an SLR, cheap point-and-click, or ever-present cameraphone - as you are your wallet and keys. It seems nothing has officially happened until it's been photographed and posted online.

Which is perhaps why Getty Images and Big Pictures have announced that they are encouraging non-professional photographers to take pictures for cash. Getty has set up a partnership with the photo-sharing site Flickr; its editors will trawl users' pages to find great images, which they will buy at the same rate as for established journalists.

Big Pictures, owned by the infamous Australian paparazzo Darryn Lyons, has started an offshoot called Mr Paparazzi where "the man or woman in the street can make BIG money from their own celebrity snaps. Now everyone s a paparazzo!"

Big claims that a set of amateur pictures of Cameron Diaz surfing made 16,000 pounds ($32,090), and another of Amy Winehouse fetched 500 pounds. The cash was split evenly between the agency and the photographer who just happened to be strolling past.

But if anyone can do it, and make money, then why not me? I'm in New York, home of the celebrity, and I arm myself with a point-and-shoot and a mobile-phone camera. I decide to seek advice.

"It is very much right place, right time stuff," says Rob Bennett, a photographer for the New York Times and adjunct professor of Photojournalism at Columbia University. He has taken celebrity pictures on assignment and by chance, and started his career when he sold 9/11 aftermath pictures to the New York Post as an amateur.

Does he have any tips? "You need good information or a good sense of where celebrities are going to be," he says. "Situations develop quickly so you have to be able to use your camera to be up and firing very fast. A certain tactfulness can go a long way, coupled with a willingness to take calculated risks. You're also going to have a lot more luck outdoors in the daytime than indoors."

I completely ignored this wisdom. After two days and nights of trawling New York for opportunities, with a miffed Kirsten Dunst questioning me in the nightclub Beatrice Inn at 3 am. "Hey, did you just take a picture of me?" she inquires reasonably enough, "because I just saw a flash."

The reason, of course, she saw a flash is because I had just taken a picture of her - but was too amateurish to know how to turn the flash off. That she was being very nice about the whole thing, where others might have called for bodyguards and bouncers, somehow made it worse.

I'm only slightly ashamed to admit I panicked. A garbled confession, and a surreal conversation about Hackney, London later, she agrees to have another snap taken with me. But I get the impression I won't be receiving a Christmas card from the Dunst household.

Salman Rushdie, who I managed to grab on my phone camera at a celeb-filled table-tennis party called Naked Ping Pong, also gave me a disappointed look. Breaking one of the cardinal rules of life in Manhattan - thou shalt not get excited by, or bother, famous people - is cringe-makingly difficult.

You need a thick skin, explains Chris Doherty, the owner of the paparazzi agency INF that licenses amateur pictures in the same way Mr Paparazzi does. "We are talking rhino thick." INF gets most of its pictures through tips from drivers, doormen and other sources.

The more eyes and ears you have out there, the more likely you are to pick up things you might have missed," says Doherty. "The big pictures, the valuable pictures, are not the ones you see two dozen guys standing around to shoot. That one picture of a celebrity with someone they shouldn't be with, or doing something they shouldn't be doing, is what you want."

That the average person is more photo-savvy is leading this change.

But there are downsides. editors will have to work harder - checking that amateur pictures haven't been doctored, for instance.

In the UK, the Press Complaints Commission states that it is unacceptable to photograph individuals in a private place without their consent - and the definition of a "private place" includes public property "where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy".

Bennett thinks that the rise of untrained photographers has contributed to the sometimes violent scenes in the LA paparazzi pack. "It gives all photographers a bad name," he explains.

On the whole, however, he sees good in this industry revolution. "Frankly, the reason that a lot of photojournalists bitch about it is that it raises the bar for all of us," he says. "We have to really differentiate ourselves and prove we're better."

It's a shock then that none of my pictures sell. Bennett analyzes them: "They're horrible. The first picture is very messy, it only gives a hint of Rushdie, it's out of focus and motion blurred."

And as for my not-so-subtle picture of Dunst: "Three quarters of the frame is completely uninteresting, you've amputated her right foot and part of her left foot and I think that white thing in the corner is your own shoe. And you cannot really tell it's he."

These both show a fear of revealing yourself to the subject. You can see that you were scared of approaching them. Actually, "the one of you and her has value," he says. "Citizen journalism like this works when the photographer engages with the subject. After all, who doesn't want to know what it's like to party with Kirsten Dunst?"

The Guardian

(China Daily 07/23/2008 page9)