Rino Barillari

King of the paparazzi

RINO BARILLARI

King of the Paparazzi

Curators: Olga Strada, Anna Zaitseva, Maria Lavrova

As part of the biennale Fashion and Style in Photography – 2025, the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow presents the exhibition ‘King of the Paparazzi’ by classic Italian photojournalist Rino Barillari. His lens captured stars of the first magnitude such as Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, Woody Allen, Claudia Schiffer, George Clooney and Bruce Willis. Over the years Barillari himself became a celebrity, becoming the epitome of the paparazzi phenomenon. As he snapped public favourites without warning in an informal setting, he regularly got involved in scuffles: he was hospitalised 165 times and his ribs broken 12 times, with 78 cameras and 40 flashes smashed.

The word ‘paparazzi’ first appeared thanks to director Federico Fellini: in his acclaimed film ‘La Dolce Vita’ (1960) one of the characters, an intrusive photojournalist, is called Paparazzo. Soon the name caught on. Symbolically, according to one version, it was Fellini himself who awarded Rino Barillari the title ‘king of the paparazzi’. 

Rino Barillari was born in 1945 in the southern town of Limbadi, in Calabria. At the age of 14 the boy ran away from home, clad in his father’s jacket and polished shoes with holes, small change jingling in the pocket of his grandfather’s overcoat as he set off to conquer the capital. “It was a stroke of luck that Rome has the Villa Borghese Park, where I spent the night, and the Trevi Fountain – travellers threw coins there, sometimes they missed and I picked them up. That’s how I lived,” says Barillari. One of the most famous fountains in the world gave the young Rino not only his first means of livelihood, but also a life’s work. He began helping photographers who took pictures of anyone who wanted against the backdrop of this landmark (he asked other people to step out of the frame), and soon he took up the camera himself: there were a lot of tourists, people now felt free to enjoy a peaceful life as Rome recovered after several difficult decades.

Entry into World War II on the side of Germany and the years of dictatorship led Italy to poverty and ruin. In the 1950s and 1960s well-equipped film studios stood idle in a poor, but still very beautiful, warm country, and people agreed to work for pennies. The excellent conditions for inexpensive film production attracted producers, and Rome gradually became ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’. Ava Gardner, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra and Alfred Hitchcock came here. Their faces were familiar to the young Barillari, who as a child helped his uncle show films in open-air cinemas. Spending the night at the Trevi Fountain, he began shooting the actors who paid a visit, developing his film in the morning and taking the photos to news agencies.

Fine clothes, movie stars and nocturnal promenades in the beautiful scenery of this majestic city comprised the dolce vita, the ‘sweet life’ that Rino Barillari saw so accurately through his lens and recorded for history. Newspapers and magazines paid generously for sensational photos: readers were enthralled by the vibrant life of the rich and famous. Thanks to the paparazzi they were assured that even the ‘gods’ have shortcomings. Barillari and his colleagues based their approach to photography on showing public favourites in everyday life, outside the carefully calibrated image of the star.

The young, dexterous Barillari learned to shoot ‘on the fly’, from close-up. He quickly realized that an ordinary picture of a star after prior consent would not make a big impression, so he waited for the artists and blinded them with his flash. The celebrity would cover their face with one hand, hide, as if concealing something – wow, super! And although some celebrities understood the importance of press attention and provoked scandals themselves, often the heroes of these publications disliked the invasion of their privacy. Barillari’s first fight with one of his photography subjects, Oscar nominee Peter O'Toole, occurred back in 1963. Now, when the photographer is already 80, he is waiting for the trial of Gérard Depardieu to start. The actor attacked Barillari in a café on Rome’s famous Via Veneto in May 2024.

Determination, the ability to take risks, professional intuition and the ability to get to the right place faster than others (assisted by listening to the radio on the police frequency and a large circle of acquaintances in every district and establishment in Rome) later helped Rino Barillari become a truly great, significant reporter. He worked for the leading daily newspapers Il Messaggero and Il Tempo, and his images joined the visual chronicle of Italian history.

In 1968, with the onset of student unrest, the dolce vita was a thing of the past. The country entered a period of profound political and social upheaval.

In the ‘leaden seventies’ Italy was swept by a wave of terrorism. Already the news focused not on movie stars, but on criminal gangs, protesters, the organisers of street fights and prison riots. Barillari, often risking his life, promptly covered events: the murder of the former Prime Minister, popular politician Aldo Moro, by the Red Brigades; the high-profile kidnapping of American tycoon Paul Getty’s grandson by the Mafia; an assassination attempt on the Pope; the brutal and still unsolved killing of director Pier Paolo Pasolini...

Rino Barillari's photographs captured important events during this dramatic period in the history of Italy. For his achievements in photography he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (1998).