Golden age of paparazzi celebrated

At a time when the paparazzi are increasingly vilified, and celebrities win court cases against them for invasion of privacy, their work and methods are to be honoured in Berlin this week with a spectacular exhibition at the Helmut Newton Foundation.

Newton, who died in 2004, was certainly no street-corner snapper himself. He specialised in intricately staged, often kinky photos of naked women, many of which can be seen at the foundation. But he was intrigued by the paparazzi and, in the early 1970s, paid six of them to snap away at one of his own clothed models, as if they were on the chase. Newton then photographed the episode himself.

Unfortunately, the paps decided to sell the shoot to their own outlets and Newton had to dig even deeper into his pockets to buy back their film. The result, called Linea

Italiana after the publication which commissioned the project, takes pride of place in Berlin.

Newton's admiration for two pioneers of the genre is central to the show. One was Erich Salomon, who covered the 1929 trial of a Berlin killer by hiding a camera in his hat. The images allowed him to turn professional; Salomon subsequently became one of the most famous photojournalists of the 1930s.

In the US at the same time, Arthur Fellig ('Weegee') focussed on down-and-outs, disaster and death (his nickname is a Brooklyn distortion of 'Ouija'). By listening to police radio exchanges, he'd get to accidents and crime scenes before the cops, and snap what he found.

After the war, the world's taste for glamour, film and fame generally replaced human upset. Snappers gained power: catching a star unawares and knowing how