{"id":524,"date":"2026-02-28T15:14:19","date_gmt":"2026-02-28T15:14:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/luciophoto.com\/?p=524"},"modified":"2026-05-03T15:06:23","modified_gmt":"2026-05-03T15:06:23","slug":"elio-sorci","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/luciophoto.com\/en\/elio-sorci\/","title":{"rendered":"Elio Sorci"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Elio Sorci<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Elio Sorci was one of the world’s first paparazzi.
He captured the spirit of La Dolce Vita with his pictures of Italian and international celebrities in Rome during the 1950s and 1960s.Some of the targets of his lens included Claudia Cardinale doing the housework, Anita Ekberg at the wheel of her car and Audrey Hepburn walking her dog.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As seen on Camera Press<\/a><\/p>\n

Recensione:\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Original Paparazzo<\/h1>\n

Elio Sorci and the birth of celebrity culture<\/h2>\n
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Elio Sorci was a paparazzo before there was a name for it. His cat-and-mouse game through the streets of his native Rome was a far cry from today\u2019s long lenses pointed at luxury yachts, but the us-against-them mentality towards the rich and famous was the same. \u201cA paparazzo, \u201d he stated, \u201cis a young, carefree, happy man who earns his daily bread by putting other people into difficulty and doesn\u2019t mind the risks.\u201d<\/p>\n

The term \u2018paparazzo\u2019 entered the global vernacular with the release of Federico Fellini\u2019s\u00a0La Dolce Vita<\/em>\u00a0in 1960: Walter Santesso played the celebrity-chasing photographer ‘Paparazzo,’ and the rest was history. Sorci was there to document it, having been asked to visit Fellini\u2019s set and capture chance moments with, among others, Anita Ekberg, who appears here in an exclusive edit from Roads publishing’s forthcoming book\u00a0Paparazzo: The Elio Sorci Collection<\/em>, alongside Sorci\u2019s shots of Keith Richards, Tina Turner, Audrey Hepburn and Clint Eastwood.<\/p>\n

Sorci was named the highest-paid photographer in the world in 1963. He passed away last year, and did not consider the generations that followed him to be true practitioners of his craft. \u201c[He] found his professional path by chance rather than design,\u201d writes Christies\u2019 Director and International Head of Photography, Philippe Garner in an introductory essay to the book. \u201cIndeed, it might be rightly posited that it was precisely their lack of formal training, their lack of self-consciousness towards the medium, the absence of all those aesthetic and ethical anxieties that can inhibit spontaneity, that cast them so perfectly in the role of ruthless image-hunters.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paparazzo: The Elio Sorci Collection\u00a0is published by Roads, and is available in limited-edition with an archival quality digital print.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I had the honor of being part of his team of photographers at his agency in Rome on Via Quattro Novembre.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Elio Sorci Elio Sorci was one of the world’s first paparazzi.He captured the spirit of La Dolce Vita with his pictures of Italian and international celebrities in Rome during the 1950s and 1960s.Some of the targets of his lens included Claudia Cardinale doing the housework, Anita Ekberg at the wheel of her car and Audrey […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":525,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pgc_sgb_lightbox_settings":"","ai_generated_summary":"","_locale":"en_GB","_original_post":"https:\/\/luciophoto.com\/?p=524","wpai_meta_description":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[69],"class_list":["post-524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-photographers","tag-english","en-GB"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/luciophoto.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/luciophoto.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/luciophoto.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/luciophoto.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/luciophoto.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=524"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/luciophoto.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3638,"href":"https:\/\/luciophoto.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524\/revisions\/3638"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/luciophoto.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/luciophoto.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/luciophoto.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/luciophoto.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}