As celebs shelter at home, paparazzi hustle to find new angles
LOS ANGELES - In his more than two decades working as a paparazzi photographer, Giles Harrison has gone to some wild extremes to get the shots he wanted. He was once chased across the Gulf of Mexico by law enforcement personnel in gunboats while trying to photograph Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston on vacation. He hung outside a helicopter to snap aerial photos of the 1997 wedding of Andre Agassi and Brooke Shields.
Still, nothing prepared him for the unprecedented challenge of working as a paparazzo in the middle of a global pandemic. "I don't think anybody saw this coming," Harrison, 51, said recently.
Amid the misery and economic devastation wrought by the coronavirus outbreak, the fate of those who make their living snapping candid photos of Hollywood's rich and famous - routinely invading their personal privacy and at times even putting lives at risk - may not rank high among the general public's concerns. But for Harrison and the hundreds of other paparazzi currently working in Los Angeles and other celebrity-dense cities like New York, Miami and London, the pandemic has brought their work to a virtual grinding halt.
