Tazio Secchiaroli (Rome, 1925–1998) began his career in his early twenties as a street photographer, but it was his friend Sergio Strizzi who introduced him to the world of photo agencies. Under the guidance of Adolfo Porry Pastorel, he learned the tricks of the trade so well that his work was soon being published in Epoca, L’Espresso, and Le Ore. He continued his work as a reporter capable of major scoops at Roma Press Photo, the agency he founded in 1955. While documenting Rome’s vibrant nightlife—brought to life by figures from the film world—he met Federico Fellini. The connection they shared (it was Secchiaroli who suggested the name Paparazzo for one of the characters in La Dolce Vita) led him to a successful career as a set photographer, eventually becoming the official photographer of Sophia Loren.

That set of 8½, where the scene in which Marcello Mastroianni was to wield and use a whip was being rehearsed, must have been a spectacle within a spectacle. To explain to his actors – and even his actresses – how they were to move, Federico Fellini often took to donning the costume and mimicking the gestures: under the watchful eye and predatory lens of Tazio Secchiaroli, the director performs a daring pas de deux with the actor he regarded as his alter ego, who is wearing the costume, whilst the director himself is in an immaculate white shirt, complete with a tie. Secchiaroli, as is well known, had become Sophia Loren’s official photographer, and this magnificent portrait of the diva—in which he captures her beauty, ever poised between the common and the haughty—is enough to understand why.