“I THINK EVERYONE SHOULD BE BUGGED ALL THE TIME...BUGGED AND PHOTOGRAPHED”

Love them or hate them, those pesky photographers and videographers and their rabid attention are still fame's best measurement. And judging by the proliferation of gossip magazines and the photographs inside them, the public can never get enough."We always want to know what the Joneses do, or where we stand in relation to everyone else," said Kenneth Dunning, the Old City photographer and founder of Paparazziphilly.com. "What makes you better than me? What do you have that I don't have? It's not good enough for us just to hear about it; we need the pictures to show us."
What sort of culture demands a level of faked fame like hired paparazzi? Robert J. Thompson blames our search for attention on a caste-less society."The great thing about democracy - an incredibly fluid system where presumably everyone's created equal - is that anybody can grow up and be a star. That's the good part," said Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University."The bad part is often the very same thing. If there are no official designations of status, we then have to carve it out in other ways."

Philadelphia Inquirer
Jan 7 2009