Felice Quinto

Felice Quinto (born April 11, 1929 in Milan , † January 16, 2010 in Rockville, Maryland ) was an Italian photographer . He was one of the most famous paparazzi ; in the media he was and is often referred to as the king of the paparazzi .

Life

Quinto's parents owned a specialty photo shop in Milan. After an apprenticeship as a car mechanic, he began his career as a paparazzo in Rome in 1954 . When asked about his education, he stated in an interview with the Dallas Morning News in 1985 that the only need to have food was his school.

He achieved his first successes in 1955 with photos of Silvana Mangano and Katherine Dunham . In 1960 he was used by Federico Fellini , who had known Quinto for several years, as a supporting actor in the film La Dolce Vita - the film in which the term paparazzo was coined. Quinto took advantage of his role to secretly take photos of the leading actress Anita Ekberg . He surprised her in a cafe in Rome, hugging a married producer. The photo has been published. The scandal that followed made Quinto world-famous: Anita Ekberg surprised him with his camera on October 20, 1960 at 5 a.m. in front of her house. A well-known photo shows how she, armed with a bow and arrow, in a black dress and nylon stockings, but without shoes, confronts him.

In 1963, after the wedding of the American teacher Geraldine del Giorno, he moved to the USA. He worked for Associated Press , the agency to which he had sold some of the paparazzo photos he had taken in Rome by well-known artists in the years before, but now turned to classic, serious photojournalism. He photographed the funerals for John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King and created photo reports about the black civil rights movement.

He remained true to his calling as a portraitist of famous personalities. However, he no longer photographed them secretly and anonymously, but rather openly. In the 1970s, a series of recordings of prominent visitors, such as Liza Minnelli and Bianca Jagger in daring, provocative clothes , was made in the New York discotheque Studio 54 . Ian Schrager, the founder of Studio 54 , attributed part of his success to the spectacular photos by Felice Quinto, which were published worldwide. Large-format prints of those pictures now adorn the walls of Studio 54 in the MGM Grand in Las Vegas . In those years, Quinto managed to win the trust of artists rather than secretly chasing them. He even became Elizabeth Taylor's personal portrait photographer .

He retired in 1993 and has lived with his wife in the small town of Montgomery Village , Maryland , ever since . He died on January 16, 2010 of complications from pneumonia.

literature

• Michel Guerrin: Felice Quinto . Le Monde , February 15, 2010, p. 23

Web links

• Obituary at Der Standard
• Biography at The Times (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Obituary for Felice Quinto at the Telegraph