Ever got frustrated that your camera's subject-detection AF missed some small detail in a picture? Spare a thought for David Koppel. For him in the 1980s and 90s, a bad day at work involved David Bowie climbing onto a table and punching him in the head.
That wasn't a one-off, either. Along the way, the London paparazzo was thumped by Mick Jagger, swatted with a rolled-up newspaper by Bob Dylan, put in a headlock by Pierce Brosnan and scolded by Joanna Lumley.
It all adds entertaining color to his new book, Spotlight, which brings together some of his best images and the stories behind them. And if that were not enough, Frank Sinatra, Princess Diana, Marlon Brando and Kate Moss all make appearances too.
Spotlight is the second volume of his archive, following 2025's Limelight, which reflected on his years as house photographer at the eponymous Soho nightclub. But where that book captured a scene, this one's all about the chase.
Take his Marlon Brando picture from 1992, shown below. A tip about the iconic actor arriving at Heathrow Airport turned out to be a bust, so he and a rival pap went for a Chinese meal in Bayswater, only for Brando to walk in and sit at the next table.
Koppel waited in a parked car until he left, then opened the door of Brando's taxi and fired six frames in two seconds. The picture ran across the national papers the next morning and earned him around £5,000 (approx. $6,625), the equivalent of around £15K (approx. $19,875) today.
Six frames in two seconds won't sound impressive to anyone used to the burst modes on a modern digital camera, or even a phone. But back in those days, all Koppel had to work with was a roll of film, no screen to check and no idea whether his shots were in focus until he'd processed it.
His kit was top of the range for the time, though. John Stoddart's portrait of him shows him with a Nikon F4, a second body, a flashgun and an Aircall pager clipped to his belt. But being a pap wasn't about the equipment; it was about getting yourself in the right place at the right time. That wasn't always as easy as it might seem, but he usually found a way around it.
For instance, he wasn't on the press rota for the 1991 royal premiere of the comedy musical movie Stepping Out. So he bought a ticket, smuggled a dismantled Nikon past security, reassembled it in the toilets and posed as an usher. His shot of Diana greeting Liza Minnelli made the front page of The Sun newspaper, which, despite his request to leave him uncredited, printed his name in large type. "There goes the knighthood," he reflects.
Rude awakening
To get his lens in front of as many celebs as possible, he drew on a network of drivers, doormen, PRs, hotel staff and informers, and stood outside hotels for as long as it took. He found the GoldenEye set in Monte Carlo after a tip from a friendly electrician. He caught Bob Dylan and his son Jakob by sprinting after their car into a hotel car park and shooting through the window.
While most of us can admire his ambition, in 2026, few of us nowadays will admire his profession. It's hard to argue with Bowie's verdict that Koppel was "SO rude" after he'd climbed down a fire escape into a club kitchen to shoot him and Jagger after being asked not to.
Public tolerance for this kind of pursuit finally collapsed after Diana's death in Paris in 1997. When Koppel bumped into Brosnan again in Phuket around that time, the actor called him "paparazzi scum" and walked off. It was Koppel's last paparazzi job.
The pictures endure, though, because they're unguarded. As the Sunday Times once wrote, he caught stars "without their minders, their make-up and the airbrush". And in an age of carefully managed Instagram grids, that's rare.
Spotlight by David Koppel will be published by Pap Art in November, priced £75. For more information, visit www.davidkoppel.co.uk.
