Ron Galella
After first laying eyes on Jackie Kennedy at a gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in 1967, the American paparazzo Ron Galella followed her home and remained a pesky presence in her life for well over a decade. “Smash his camera,” she told a Secret Service agent not long before the two ended up in court for the first time, in 1972. Still, Galella had his fans, Warhol among them, and he’s been credited with pioneering not only a genre of photography in America but a new kind of stardom, paving the way for street-style photographers like Scott Schuman and Tommy Ton. In October 1971, he took the picture that he’d call, in a 2010 documentary, his “Mona Lisa.” Having spotted the former first lady, who was by then Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, exiting her building near Central Park, he hopped into a cab to trail her. At one point, the driver honked and she looked over, the wind in her hair, oversize sunglasses in her hand and the hint of a smile on her lips. If Galella’s memorialization of this moment represents Onassis’s inability to move freely through the world, it also suggests the opposite, encapsulating a period when she was more likely to be wearing jeans and a ribbed henley than a skirt suit and pillbox hat. It’s this Jackie whom, 55 years later, we’re still trying to emulate. — K.G.
Linda Evangelista: This is a rare paparazzi picture that’s good, and I love the fashion. It’s not the Jackie O. we knew. This had to have inspired all of Anna Wintour’s earliest issues.
Ian Bradley: It created the American Vogue formula: Put her in a henley.
Nick Haramis: Cate, you’d nominated a paparazzi photo of her son, John F. Kennedy Jr., and his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, from 1999.
Ian Bradley: I started with J.F.K. Jr. and Carolyn too, but then I thought about that Jackie picture. I feel like their entire haunting by paparazzi was about trying to get to that Jackie moment.
Nick Haramis: But as a photograph …
Inez Van Lamsweerde: Well, Jackie’s is a real picture.