You see, Ron Galella has staked out almost every celebrity that has ever strutted through the swinging doors of fame. Call him a photojournalist or the Godfather of Paparazzi: both are equally accurate. To wit, he has had his teeth knocked out by Marlon Brando (more on that later), battled it out in court with Jackie Kennedy Onassis (definitely more on that later) and been spat at, arrested by the Secret Service and told by many daughters and sons of Hollywood to kindly ​“gtfo.” But he has also been embraced and fêted by Tom Ford, Robert Redford and Andy Warhol – who called Galella his favourite photographer. He’s published books. He’s in the MoMA. He had a heavy hand in helping to invent modern celebrity, and an even heavier one in whetting our appetite for today’s bottomless brunch of celebrity content.

Galella started shooting professionally in 1958 after graduating from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, courtesy of the GI Bill. He enlisted to serve in the Korean war and learned photography on an air force base in Florida. At 88, he is nowhere close to retiring. His assistant, Kathy, tells me that he doesn’t watch much TV during the day, but rather spends most of his waking hours working on his next book or going through old images that haven’t been properly documented or digitized. Galella still makes the annual trek to the Met Gala red carpet on the Upper West Side to photograph the latest slew of fame-mongers. He does not care about these stars. ​“I see so many of them on TV or in the movies and I say I’m not missing anything,” he says.

That’s because he’s lived through Hollywood’s Golden Age, panning for nuggets while the going was good. He has stories. Big ones, tall ones, juicy ones, all printed in 8×10 and on sale for $2800 (he’s recently upped his vintage prices, he says.) In the ​‘60s, he paid off a worker $15 to lock him in a warehouse next to a docked boat from 4pm on a Friday to the following Monday morning. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were on holiday in London, in this case, but their dogs were under quarantine. So they technically couldn’t set foot on English soil – hence the boat. They strung up gauze around the boat so nobody could see on deck. The fifth floor of a warehouse next to the river where their boat was docked, however, provided the perfect perch from which to photograph the private couple with a telephoto lens. Galella caught them arguing at breakfast on a Sunday morning and sold the images to the National Enquirer for $400.