Paparazzi Speak on Meghan and Harry’s Car Chase
“After she died, I remember being on the red carpet at events and people would drive up, roll down their windows and scream: ‘You’re murderers! You’re killers,” Mr. Eichner said. “I’ve never chased a celebrity in my life.”
According to Steve Sands, another photographer who has spent the better part of his adult life photographing celebrities, it was also a story in which the entire blame for the tragedy was laid at the photographers’ feet, with few seeming to note that the paparazzi were led on the chase by “a drunk driver” who was escorting Diana and was “determined to be a hero.” (A police inquest determined that the driver’s blood-alcohol concentration was about three times the legal limit.)
In addition, the punishing economics of the tabloid business along with the aggressive expansion of Getty Images, a leading supplier of celebrity pictures, have made it difficult to earn a living, several said in interviews on Thursday. Operating independently, they either can’t make a sale or have to hound publications for payments; agreeing to sell through Getty earns them royalties of but a few dollars on a small website.
Getting shots of celebrities in “real life” situations tends to be more lucrative, but the days of $100,000 jackpots are largely over, several said.
One person who has excelled despite these odds is Kevin Mazur, an event photographer who co-founded the company Wire Image. In 2007, Wire Image was sold to Getty as part of what was described at the time as a $200 million deal. But Mr. Mazur continues to shoot constantly, including on Tuesday, when he was the sole photographer with full access at the Ms. Foundation gala.
That both enabled him to get the only clean shots of Prince Harry and Meghan inside the venue while providing the other shutterbugs with much to complain about as they cast the event as a parable for how monopolies overfeed those at the top and starve everyone else at the bottom. At the same time, the cries of victimhood by paparazzi are less likely to elicit sympathy than the ones made by a man whose mother died in a car crash fleeing from them.
Source: The New York Times
