ABSTRACT
Paparazzi photography emerged in Rome during the 1950s, offering a candid view of stars. This helped foster a celebrity culture that would become the subject of critique for artists in the postmodern period. In the 1940s and 1950s, when photojournalism was at the peak of what would later become known as its 'golden age', and Hollywood cinema was likewise enjoying its heyday, magazines such as Life, Look and Harper's Bazaar commissioned leading photographers such as Arnold Newman, Philippe Halsman and Eve Arnold to photograph stars of the day. Throughout the 1960s fame and its manufacture through 'low culture' was a source of fascination for artists associated with Pop Art. Warhol used celebrity portraits taken from Polaroids or magazines to create silkscreen prints that repeated their image in a grid - a prescient comment on the cult of celebrity that has continued to swell in the years since, thanks to the prevalence of paparazzi culture.
