Followers of paparazzi-focused Instagram accounts probably noticed a change in tone last week, when photos of celebrities like Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck It represented the stars away from their usual coffee or shopping outings. Instead, paparazzi headed to some of the most dangerous areas of fire-ravaged Los Angeles in search of the actors, in a move that a fellow photojournalist described as “appalling.”
Separated since 2015 (and divorced two years later), Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck (separately, together, and everything in between) have continued to be a source of tabloid fascination, even during mundane tasks like walking the dog or carrying their three children. children to school. Affleck, especially, is a tabloid asset, and some even muse that the actor-director has occasionally cooperated with street photographers to help them get that lucrative shot.
You might assume that the fires burning in Los Angeles would disrupt the paparazzi industry, but you know what they say about assumptions. After all, this is a business that managed to find a way through the pandemic, when the world’s most famous faces were masked and locked down.
These days, the images published by celebrity news agencies like Backgrid don’t come from photographers camped outside well-known celebrity bars like Sushi Park or Delilah. Instead, we are faced with photographs of Affleck driving a vehicle with an impartial expression, performed by a subtitle writer while “Ben Affleck opens his eyes wide in shock as he drives home from his office and sees a massive wildfire burning in front of his Los Angeles home.”
It is a repositioning that Giles Harrison, owner of the London Leisure Group paparazzi agency, is not entirely comfortable. “What these guys are doing is a little… I hate to denigrate what I do for a living, but it’s a little macabre,” Harrison said. he tells the butler.
Singling out images of Affleck for special attention, he said the photos “of Ben Affleck driving around, supposedly looking for his kids, are bullshit. “He was probably going to Jennifer Garner’s house and I’m sure someone saw him walking by or whatever and got the frames.”
(Garner, for his part, might not have been home; he is been working as a volunteer with World Central Kitchen, feeding evacuees at one of the nonprofit relief organization’s locations in Los Angeles. “I’ve lived in and around the Palisades for 25 years, so I think all of us want to put in the work, in some way, to be useful,” Garner. he told MSNBC on Friday.)
But according to Randy Bauerowner of the Bauer-Griffin paparazzi agency, those photos of Affleck could have been more than a coincidence. “We know Ben. We know Jennifer Garner,” Bauer tells Vulture. “There are all these people who live on Amalfi and Sundown Boulevard, sort of the epicenter of celebrities living in Pacific Palisades… but we don’t really know which houses are burning and where the fire is in direct proximity to their house specifically. “
