Marcello Geppetti
Italian photographer (1933–1998)
Marcello Geppetti (1933–1998) was an Italian photographer.
"The most underrated photographer in history"
This is how David Schonauer, the editor in chief of American Photo magazine, described Geppetti in 1997 during an exhibition at New York's Robert Miller Gallery.
The New York Times and Newsweek compare him to Cartier-Bresson and Weegee.
Two of his shots (the kiss between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and Anita Ekberg shooting arrows at the photographers) were considered among the thirty most famous photos and his name appears (is listed) next to those of Andy Warhol and Cecil Beaton.
Nevertheless, the archive of over a million photographs by Geppetti has remained largely unexplored and only a small part of its cultural and artistic potential has been exploited. In 2010, this prompted the heirs to begin a systematic rearranging of the archive.
Biography
Geppetti got started at the Giuliani and Rocca's agency, then he worked at Meldolesi-Canestrelli-Bozzer one of the most important agencies of the 1950s and 1960s.
In that period he took the distressing photo of some women who threw themselves into the void while the Ambassadors Hotel was on fire in Via Veneto, in Rome; the photos were so strong and intense that they went all over the world.
He was a member of a group of photographers that inspired Federico Fellini to create the character of a news photographer named Paparazzo in the film La Dolce Vita in 1960.
When he didn't like working anymore as an employee, Geppetti began working as a freelance, working closely for ten years with the Momento Sera, one of the most important newspaper at that time.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Marcello Geppetti” as italian photographer (1933–1998). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2198572. VIAF identifies the subject as 66303068. The Library of Congress control number is no2009006602. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1933, 1998, 1997 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Marcello Geppetti” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.