Ron Galella: Onassis to Artist
The suburban flaneurs who poured into slum-cleared postwar Manhattan wandered its streets with little of the leisure of their Parisian predecessors, secure in knowing all that they were against. Creating a middle class society across the nation entailed at our soundstage, Midtown, tearing down such Beaux-Arts shrines to the industrialists’ social order for utilitarian glass buildings and highways that symbolized our miraculous financial system.
But urban renewal was from day one indistinguishable from urban decay and it comes as no surprise that habitué photographers from Garry Winogrand to Peter Hujar are conspicuously unable to offer insight as to why. Their photographs adorn museum walls because Washington Street has changed quite a bit, while Galella’s famous 1971 photograph of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis crossing Madison in plain clothes looks obvious now. Its grotesque conceit, that this otherwise wholly ordinary photo was the result of very improbable circumstances, is in fact our Romulus and Remus. Onassis, unlike Mona Lisa, regrets smiling at you: everyone’s attempts to keep it real have backfired to create an uncomfortably artificial and theatrical picture. America remains fascinated with this photo because it establishes both the subject and the photographer as vulnerable: she apparently murmuringly desperate for affection, he, desperate for attention not as a photographer to any audience, but as a hapless cupid whose bow and arrow is the camera. The “codependent” relationship with Onassis taught Galella to photograph en plein air as a silver screen film director, yet he would go on to master his craft into the 1990s by slowly becoming as much as the kind of machine the likes of Warhol aspired to be.
Galella’s photography reaches a gently menacing objectivity, and a rhythm, years into his career when after constant flights between Los Angeles and New York for premieres, weddings, funerals, AIDS benefits, etc. events begin to blur. Galella is clearly by no means jaded or even disinterested, but his life has evidently synced with his camera a la Ray Kurzweil. At the 1997 politically charged funeral for Time Warner chief Gerald Levin’s murdered Bronx schoolteacher son, Galella followed Jane Fonda. Her casually valiant demeanor atop Madison’s slope at 86th Street counterpoised by the stiff police officer has the eeriness of Balthus’ The Street, but like a Rorschach defaults to a style shot the moment you doubt yourself.
To convey the excitement of the moment Galella developed a consistent vocabulary. These photos, at their best, show the subject in some way avoiding Galella the man, but simultaneously deftly looking into his camera. Yet the subjects are not merely literally contrapposto. By operating in a glitzy sect of high society still negotiating its tone towards the entertainment industry (that is, courting the alluring controversy of Hollywood without being consumed by the conglomerates’ Midas touch to commodify and entomb everyone in its reach) he leaves in the image a parallel experience to the viewer’s intrigue at his photos checked by how banal they can be at face value. Romantic symphonies as well, in each moment negotiating awe or fear of modernity while trying to relate that experience to beauty or abstraction, reflected closely not so much the audience’s similar qualms and desires as the composer’s contemporaries, but as listeners in the theatre: in craving idiosyncrasy that evening, they found themselves in the city’s most capacious hall so in order to listen they had to daydream.
