Armin Linke & Corrado Calvo: Paparazzi

Captivating celebrity snapshots from the early 2000s test our perceptions of candid and staged photography

Everyone knows these kinds of photographs from glossy magazines: snapshots of fast boats, dark sunglasses and dalliances. Whoever shows themselves on the beaches of Sardinia also acknowledges those shadowy beings in hiding, lurking behind their cameras. Paparazzi and celebrities are symbiotically intertwined; they produce "secret images" in collaboration. Together with Corrado Calvo--one of the most famous paparazzi to date--Italian photographer Armin Linke (born 1966) publishes a selection of sequences from a conglomeration of 80,000 images from the early aughts. Through the photographs in this series, a new kind of logic emerges, standing in stark contrast to the images dispersed in mass media; their staged character becomes obvious. Like a comic strip or a film still, the context of the frame only becomes evident in the sequential viewing of the pictures. The photos thus unexpectedly become social documents.