Followers of paparazzi-focused Instagram accounts likely noticed a change in tone last week, as photos of celebrities such as Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck depicted the stars far from their usual coffee runs or shopping trips. Instead, paparazzi headed to some of the most dangerous zones in fire-afflicted Los Angeles in search of the actors, in a move one fellow photojournalist described as “ghoulish.”
Parted since 2015 (and divorced two years later) Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck—separately, together, and everything in-between—have remained a source of tabloid fascination, even during mundane tasks such as walking the dog or taking their three kids to school. Affleck, especially, is a tabloid standby, with some even musing that the actor and director has occasionally cooperated with on-the-street photogs to help them get that lucrative shot.
One might assume that the fires burning across Los Angeles would disrupt the paparazzi industry, but you know what they say about assumptions. This is a business, after all, that managed to find a way through the pandemic, when the world’s most famous faces were masked and locked down.
These days, the images posted by celebrity news agencies such as Backgrid aren’t coming from photographers camped outside known celebrity watering holes such as Sushi Park or Delilah. Instead, we’re confronted with photos of Affleck driving a vehicle with a neutral expression, interpreted by a caption writer as “Ben Affleck opens his eyes widely in shock while driving home from his office and sees a huge wildfire burning across the street from his home in Los Angeles.”
It’s a repositioning that Giles Harrison, owner of the paparazzi agency London Entertainment Group, isn’t completely comfortable with. “What these guys are doing, it’s a bit — I hate to denigrate what I do for a living, but it’s kind of ghoulish,” Harrison tells Vulture.
Singling images of Affleck out for special attention, he said that the photos “of Ben Affleck driving around, supposedly looking for his children are bullshit. He was probably going over to Jennifer Garner’s house and I’m sure somebody just happened to see him drive by or whatever and got the frames.”
(Garner, for her part, might not have been at home—she’s been working as a volunteer with World Central Kitchen, feeding evacuees at one of the nonprofit relief effort’s locations in Los Angeles. “I’ve lived in and around the Palisades for 25 years, so I just think all of us, we want to get our hands into working, somehow, to be helpful,” Garner told MSNBC Friday.)
But according to Randy Bauer, the owner of the paparazzi agency Bauer-Griffin, those photos of Affleck might have been more than happenstance. “We know Ben. We know Jennifer Garner,” Bauer tells Vulture. “There are all these people that live off Amalfi and Sunset Boulevard, kind of the epicenter of celebrity living in Pacific Palisades…but we don’t really know whose homes are burning down and where the fire is in direct proximity to their particular house.”
