From a bridge over the Thames, Mark Saunders points out the Eton College boathouse. This is where he got photograph of Prince William rowing crew. It was easy: All he needed was the school’s sports schedule and a long lens.
He had to put out a little more effort for the picture he got in the school’s courtyard of the upset prince talking with his mother, Princess Diana, the day before the BBC aired its candid and controversial interview with her in 1995. He needed a very long lens. He had to pay someone $1,500 for the tip that she would be there.
The payoff did not make a big dent in his profits. He will not say how much he made from that particular shot, but, at 34, he drives a violet BMW 325i with white leather seats and lives, alone, in a three-bedroom house on the nice side of town.
It is a safe bet that Princess Diana and her children bought him the car and the house and the Ralph Lauren shirt he is wearing and the Calvin Klein belt holding up his khakis and his chocolate-brown leather topsiders.
For five years, Saunders pursued Diana with the vigilance of her own shadow. He climbed trees. He hid in bushes. He set up a stepladder so he could get the perfect shot of her rear end as she walked out of the gym. The newspapers called him the “British paparazzo par excellence.”
But that is all behind him now. He is a changed man. He is not a paparazzo.
“It’s my only consolation, really, that I was out of it by the time the accident happened,” he says. “The last five years seem so irrelevant now. They seem absolutely pointless.”
Not that he will come right out and say he regrets anything he did, not even as he walked up a street lined with storefronts displaying her picture. Not even the day after her funeral.
“I was doing a job,” he says. “There was a lot of people doing the job.”
It is a very unpopular job these days, given that its practitioners are getting most of the blame for causing Diana’s death, along with that of her boyfriend, Emad “Dodi” Fayed, and a driver, in a car crash.
That the driver of the car in which she died was apparently drunk has mattered less in the public mind than the fact that she was being pursued by photographers at the time. That was loudly demonstrated by the applause that greeted her brother’s criticism of the paparazzi during her funeral Saturday, and rather meekly recognized Monday by tabloid editors who announced they will not use photographs that invade her sons’ privacy.
It makes no difference to Mark Saunders. He says he has hung up his guns, so to speak. He quit, he says, and he doesn’t mind talking about the life of a Di-chaser. Plus, he has the time now. He has nowhere to be.
Before, his life was as strictly scheduled as hers. At the Chelsea Harbour Club by 7:45 a.m. to catch Diana going in and out of her morning workout. Then, back to “KP,” as the photographers called Kensington Palace, where she lived. Maybe a fancy restaurant, San Lorenzo or Bibendum, for lunch or dinner. The photographers didn’t eat there, of course. They waited in their cars.
Saunders scanned a newspaper or watched the television in his glove compartment, but never for long. The job was a matter of “keeping your eyes open.”
The goal was to catch Diana doing something–anything–when she didn’t know she was being watched. It didn’t really matter what. There was a photograph published of Diana thumbing through a copy of the Financial Times in her workout clothes. You could sell a picture of her buying a piece of fruit.
Freelancers like Saunders usually sell their pictures through photo agencies, who peddle the work to publications and take a cut of the money. The photographer gets anywhere from 50 to 75 percent of the fee. Sometimes, publications ask agencies or freelancers to get them photographs of certain celebrities, but mostly the freelance paparazzo works on his own.
If, say, the paparazzo wants to hire a speedboat to chase someone, he usually pays for it himself, although a publication might help foot the expense in exchange for the guarantee of a first look at the photos.
Spending money can make money if it produces the right photo. One photographer got an estimated $5 million for the world rights to the first photographs that documented Diana’s relationship with Dodi. The Globe bought the North American rights to Diana and Dodi photos for $200,000.
Agencies can always refuse to market photographs, publications can refuse to publish them, and the public can refuse to read the publications. But when it comes to where responsibility lies for paparazzi photos, everyone seems to point a finger at someone else.
Greg Allen, with Big Pictures agency, which represented Saunders, says most photographers work for themselves, and agencies don’t always know how they get photographs. “You’re in the dark end. They can tell you anything,” he says. And the final decision about using photographs, he says, rests with magazines and newspapers.
The publications and photographers tend to blame public demand. “This is the way it works,” says Saunders, “the public wants the pictures.”
It is a circular argument, one that begins twirling every time something happens.
As the business’ biggest jackpot, Diana got the most coverage as well as the most intrusive coverage. Even though the photographers who covered Diana say she used them as much as they used her, letting herself be photographed when it suited her purposes, there is little question that she had become increasingly frustrated with the paparazzi, chasing and yelling at them on occasion.
“It was getting a bit silly, and the princess wasn’t enjoying it anymore,” says Glenn Harvey, another Di-chaser who claims to have left the business.
She told them to “go rape somebody else.” They in turn developed a set of terminology that spoke of “hosing her down,” “blitzing her” and “whacking her.” They called her “the Loon,” and when she confronted them, they called it a “Loon attack.”
Saunders admits he used to run away from her. The hunter, for a moment, fleeing from the prey.
Saunders and Harvey wrote a book together that was published last fall. Called “Dicing with Di: The Amazing Adventures of Britain’s Royal Chasers,” it recounts their many run-ins with Diana.
In the book, Saunders describes Diana discovering him and Harvey hiding in some bushes across the street from her gym. She ordered them to come out, and when they didn’t, she started rustling through the bushes. “You look pathetic,” he says she told them.
It looks sordid and ugly now, and he knows it. The book, he insisted, was written when “it was all fun and the world was a beautiful place.” Last week, the publisher, Blake Publishing Ltd., withdrew “Dicing with Di” from bookstores in what a spokeswoman said was “an act of respect.” But the company has since said it may continue to sell it.
For all his attempts at bravado, Saunders himself looked fairly miserable, a jumpy man who smoked six cigarettes in the time it took him to drink two cups of coffee at a cafe in Windsor. He says that he has quit the business, says he hasn’t picked up a camera in months.
Diana had had enough, he says, and so had he. Plus, European photographers were horning in on the work, making it more difficult to make money at it, he says. Not to mention the fact–and he didn’t–that Diana had threatened to take legal action against the photographers who pursued her.
He does seem to have quit, although he was apparently shooting pictures of Diana as recently as April, when journalist Marianne Macdonald followed him around for an article she wrote for The Independent newspaper.
“I found him quite genuine, quite a decent man except for that part of him that did his work,” Macdonald says. “When he caught sight of Diana, he changed so completely. I found it strange.”
Saunders wants to be a decent man. He’d like to move to the United States. Maybe go back to being a print journalist, which is how he started out in Windsor a dozen years ago. He doesn’t want to take any more pictures, he says.
Anyway, who is there to take pictures of? Things may never go back to what they were for a paparazzo. Nobody will dare take photographs of Prince William, at least for a while. And who will replace Diana, at seven frames a second, never a bad frame in the lot?
“It’s like the Beatles,” he says. “Everyone wanted to know who was going to be the next Beatles. There will never be another Beatles. I don’t think there will be another Diana.”
The paparazzo drove away in his violet BMW.
