So many photographers … but at the recent MTV Video Music Awards, Sabrina Carpenter posed for just one: Kevin Mazur.
Credit...Nina Westervelt for The New York Times

The Secrets of the Ultimate Celebrity Photographer

by · NY Times

When Taylor Swift opened her Eras Tour in Glendale, Ariz., in March 2023, Kevin Mazur was granted full access to photograph the show.

When Beyoncé opened her Renaissance Tour in Stockholm, Sweden, two months later, Mr. Mazur captured the performance from directly in front of the stage.

That fall, when Madonna opened her Celebration Tour in London, Mr. Mazur was once again in position for the best shots.

At the Met Gala and Vanity Fair’s Oscar party, Mr. Mazur, 63, roams freely while photographers from major news outlets are given a short amount of time to shoot the goings-on away from the red carpet.

Bob Dylan has let him into the recording studio, Barbra Streisand has had him in her home, and Kurt Cobain invited him on a Nirvana tour. He took some of the last photographs of Michael Jackson, on the night before his death.

His motto — “Why wouldn’t you want to make people look good?” — helps explain how he became the John Singer Sargent of live-action digital photography, a go-to chronicler of rock gods and movie stars.

On a recent afternoon, when hundreds of photographers stood outside the UBS Arena on Long Island, baking in the sun while waiting to collect press badges for the MTV Video Music Awards, Mr. Mazur was already inside. He looked very much at ease in his plain black pants, black Nikes and a navy blue F.D.N.Y. T-shirt as he watched Chappell Roan do a run-through of her hit “Good Luck, Babe!”

“He’s our preferred photographer for every show,” said Bruce Gillmer, the executive producer of the annual telecast. “He gets the access he gets because he’s artistically the best in the business and the person the artists most trust.”

Mr. Mazur at his home office in Babylon, N.Y.
Credit...Landon Nordeman for The New York Times

Mr. Mazur lives with his wife, Jennifer, in a waterfront mansion in Babylon, N.Y., not far from his childhood home. During a tour of the place on a recent weekend, he paused at a wall of framed photographs. There he was with Jon Bon Jovi, Miley Cyrus, Drake, Ariana Grande, Dave Grohl, Lady Gaga, Ozzy Osbourne, Katy Perry, Julia Roberts, Britney Spears, Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson.

In his office, he took hold of a tambourine — a birthday present from Prince in 1993. Mr. Mazur first photographed His Purpleness at First Avenue, the Minneapolis nightclub featured in the 1984 movie “Purple Rain.” On that night, he was given 30 seconds to get something publishable.

“He’s performing, the lights are flashing, it was a nightmare,” Mr. Mazur said. “A single roll of film is 36 shots. I had 36 frames, and 25 were blank. But I got this one shot of him — a killer shot — that Rolling Stone ran. He was airborne in these frilly pants. I was freaking out.”

“It was one of those Hail Mary things, where you’re praying you got something,” he added. “Now, with digital, you know immediately. But back then, there was no way to be sure till you processed it.”

Down the hill from the house, he keeps a speedboat, which figured in another celebrity story: Last September, he took Sting out on the water shortly before his concert at the Jones Beach Theater, about 15 miles from Mr. Mazur’s house. They’ve been friends since the early 1990s, when Mr. Mazur shot him for Rolling Stone.

In addition to his ability to put his famous subjects at ease, Mr. Mazur gets preferential treatment from stars because he is a leading photographer for Getty Images, a major syndicator of pictures from concerts, sporting events and movie premieres.

Getty’s photographers are somewhere between journalists and courtiers to the rich and famous: Much of the company’s revenue comes directly from the celebrities and corporations who hire its photographers to shoot events in the knowledge that the images will be flattering and plentiful. The company also brings in money by selling its photos to The Daily Mail, People, The New York Times and other news outlets around the world.

Mr. Mazur wasn’t so much hired by Getty as he was bought by it. In 2001, he and seven other photographers founded WireImage, a syndicator with a focus on entertainment and sports photography that grew quickly, setting up offices in New York, London, Paris, and Los Angeles. In 2007, Getty offered to buy WireImages for around $200 million. When the partners met to take a vote, the only hand that didn’t go up belonged to Mr. Mazur.

“I walked out,” he recalled.

He wouldn’t divulge how much he had made from the sale, but a few of his friends estimated that it was around $10 million.

Photos From Kevin Mazur's Career

  1. Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
  2. Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
  3. Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
  4. Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
  5. Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
  6. Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
  7. Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
  8. Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
  9. Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
  10. Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

Mr. Mazur was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Babylon. His father was an officer with the N.Y.P.D. and a firefighter with the F.D.N.Y.; his mother, Kathy, who now lives in a section of the waterfront house that Mr. Mazur calls the North Wing, was a homemaker.

He wasn’t an easy kid.

“What didn’t he do?” Kathy said, standing in Mr. Mazur’s office, discussing his high school years, during which he partied hard and banged up cars.

Turning to her son, she added, “Did you tell him about how you got a job as a lifeguard and dove off a bridge?”

“It was the same height as a 10-meter platform,” Mr. Mazur said, describing the Fire Island Inlet Bridge. “We were young and dumb. But it was fun.”

When he was a teenager, the walls of his bedroom were covered with pictures and posters of Aerosmith, the Beatles, Black Sabbath, Farrah Fawcett, Kiss, Elton John, the Rolling Stones and the Who. He began setting himself apart from the typical fan in 1977, when he was a junior in high school and Led Zeppelin was playing six shows at Madison Square Garden.

After scoring nosebleed seats for the first night, Mr. Mazur and his friends learned the ins and outs of scalping, buying and reselling their way to the loge on the second night and the floor on the third.

Dreams of becoming a photographer swirled in his head while studied advertising, art and design at Farmingdale State College, a public university on Long Island. With no connections to speak of, he went to work after graduation at Brookdale Hospital as a medical photographer. The worst part of the job, he said, was not photographing cadavers but abused children.

“There was one kid with cigarette burns who came in three times,” he said. “There was a toddler who was hit in the face with a frying pan. It was heartbreaking.”

He unwound by going to concerts, camera in tow, at Nassau Coliseum, Max’s Kansas City, Radio City Music Hall, Madison Square Garden and CBGB. On a lark, he cold-called Annie Leibovitz, the famed celebrity portraitist, for career advice.

“When she actually picked up her phone, I had a heart attack,” Mr. Mazur said.

The conversation lasted less than a minute and involved her rattling off a list of photo syndicators. The only one he remembered was Retna. Mr. Mazur went to the company’s office, taking along some of his photos. Retna placed one of these shots, a picture of Billy Joel onstage, in People magazine, and he was on his way.

When Talking Heads played Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in 1983, Mr. Mazur sneaked backstage and made the acquaintance of Ken Sunshine, who oversaw communications for the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.

Mr. Sunshine, who would go on to be a powerful entertainment publicist and behind-the-scenes player in Democratic politics, hired Mr. Mazur to photograph Paul McCartney at a luncheon.

The ex-Beatle took a liking to Mr. Mazur, and he was soon hired to shoot a series of Elton John concerts. Before he knew it, he was photographing Elizabeth Taylor, Jon Bon Jovi, and on and on.

“He had this hustle,” Mr. Sunshine said. “And he knew when to shut up. He’s also a good person in a sea of vipers, and people sense that.”

The celebrity photo business changed drastically with the introduction of the iPhone and the advent of social media. Instead of having to rely on Us Weekly, People and OK! magazine to transmit idealized photo diaries of their lives, the stars and their handlers began doing much of the job themselves. Other photographers lost work in the shift, but Mr. Mazur continued to thrive.

“Celebrities don’t want to give access, but they trust Kevin,” Mr. Sunshine said. “So the few photos that get out are his.”

Getty and its main competitor, Shutterstock, have hung on — a duopoly in their corner of the media business — but multimillion-dollar paydays for exclusive access to the wedding of Christina Aguilera or the first photos of Jennifer Lopez’s newborn twins are a thing of the past. Mr. Mazur said his real motivation these days has more to do with adrenaline than finances.

“I have the best job in the world,” he said.

At the MTV Video Music Awards this month, more than a dozen field producers from Getty sat in front of laptops in a curtained-off area as they prepared for an evening of selecting and uploading the pictures taken by Mr. Mazur and his team to the company website.

When the red carpet portion of the evening started around 6 p.m., the hierarchy among those covering the event was all too clear: While dozens of photojournalists barked from behind the barricades at Snooki and The Situation, Mr. Mazur and his Getty colleagues moved unfettered.

The legacy celebs arrived closer to the telecast’s start time. They all seemed to know Mr. Mazur. He reminisced briefly with Cyndi Lauper about her 1980s adventures in the world of professional wrestling — “Wasn’t that wild?” she said — before sharing a fist-bump with Busta Rhymes.

“The last time I saw him was at a Jay-Z party, when he was doing shots with my son,” Mr. Mazur said.

At one point he remarked on how celebrity faces have changed.

“It’s like everyone goes to the plastic surgeon wanting to look either like Jennifer Aniston or Angelina Jolie and walks out looking like some combination of the two,” he said.

When Ms. Swift appeared, she played to Mr. Mazur’s camera. He bobbed and weaved in an effort to get a memorable shot. Then he dashed across the parking lot, toward the arena. The security guards knew him, so they didn’t flinch when he went beeping through the metal detectors.

After a quick hello to Lenny Kravitz, Mr. Mazur sprinted ahead to get a shot of Eminem, who had already hit the stage with a phalanx of Eminem look-alikes. The song was “Houdini,” and its subject could easily have been Mr. Mazur himself: He had managed to slip through a mob of fans, losing the reporter trailing him and an MTV attaché.

When the house lights came up, he was in the center of the theater, standing by the seat of Post Malone, whom he had recently photographed on tour. As he took some shots, Post was brandishing the first of the three “Moonman” trophies he and Ms. Swift would win for their collaboration, “Fortnight.”

As the night went on, Mr. Mazur maintained breakneck speed, often eluding the field producers tasked with fetching his memory cards. To get the right shot of Sabrina Carpenter, he leaped over a white-tape barrier and squeezed through an impossibly tight space between the teleprompter and the front row.

Soon he was backstage, photographing an old friend.

“Kevin, how long have we known each other?” Katy Perry said, putting an arm around him.

“Fourteen years or something,” he said.

“My entire career,” she said.

Find the Right Soundtrack for You

Trying to expand your musical horizons? Take a listen to something new.