Street Chronicles

Gallery FIFTY ONE will be celebrating its 25th anniversary throughout 2024 and 2025.

For this exhibition, we had the honour of working with Paris Match, who offered us the unique opportunity to go through their photographic archive to access this exclusive body of work.

Jack Garofalo was so skilled at slipping in almost anywhere that he was nicknamed La Ficelle – The String. First it was into the world of reporters, where he was invited by happenstance, thanks to his friend Daniel Filipacchi, who gave him his first Leica and opened the doors to Paris Match. Jack stayed there for 40 years, leaving the magazine a treasure trove of tens of thousands of photos. But what “Kiki” did best was wind himself around the hearts of his models – from the Shah of Iran, who lent him all his armoured vehicles for one picture, to Hemingway, whose entire bar he knocked back on one memorable night, his very first story.

His great friend Federico Fellini had asked him to play a paparazzo in “81⁄2”, but Jack preferred summer games of belote with Brigitte Bardot in Saint-Tropez. With a mixture of cunning and light- heartedness, which often enraged his bosses, his audacity could unnerve the toughest ones.
One day, he took André Malraux out on the waters of India’s Ganges River. “Stop your twitching, Minister, you’re going to capsize the boat.” No-one had ever dared speak to the writer like that and Malraux exploded with laughter. “Chic et voyou,” as they say at Match – the stylish lout, the gentleman brat.

Read the full press release here.