By Devonte Barr, Columnist
Alan Collela turned 80 this past July. I turned 30 this year. When I walked into his barbershop in San Pedro on June 13, he was finishing a haircut for a man who looked about his age. Alan glanced up and said, “You must be the editor.”
“No,” I said. “I’m the writer.”
He nodded slowly, the way people do when they’re recalibrating an assumption. The man in the chair studied me in the mirror. I could feel the gap — not just in age, but in the unspoken calculus of who gets to tell whose story.
Alan has been cutting hair in San Pedro for decades, but that’s not why I was there. For over 50 years, he was one of the most successful paparazzi photographers in Los Angeles. They call him the godfather of paparazzi. He shot Natalie Wood, Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen, Elizabeth Taylor. He was there when the golden age of Hollywood was in its zenith; a single photograph could pay rent for months, film was expensive, and patience was built into the medium.
I had come to ask him about all of that. What I didn’t realize was that the story I expected diverged sharply from what I actually got.
The man in the chair, a longtime friend who’d known Alan for years, occasionally filled in details or clarified a point. At one point, the driver said something that stuck with me: “He knew where to go before that person moved.”
A recurring theme for Alan is his uncanny patience.
“I was polite,” Alan said. “I’d ask permission. ‘Can I take your picture?’ Most of the time, they’d say yes. If they said no, I’d wait. Maybe later they’d change their mind.”
But politeness alone didn’t get him into the rooms where the photographs happened. Alan had cultivated relationships with well-connected photography agents who knew which parties allowed cameras, which events were worth covering, which venues would grant him access. He understood the architecture of Hollywood — not just the geography of restaurants and hotels, but the social hierarchy that determined who could move through those spaces. He gained entry through calculated intelligence: knowing which agents to work with, understanding which events would yield the best subjects, positioning himself strategically so that when a celebrity arrived, he was already there, already positioned, already waiting.
This is not how people imagine paparazzi. The popular image is frantic, aggressive, invasive — photographers swarming like hornets, shouting, blocking exits. Alan’s approach was the opposite. Restraint and courtesy were deliberate, active strategies. He treated his subjects like people, not trophies, because he understood that if you wanted a good photograph, you had to earn it. The politeness was calculated. The patience was deliberate. The positioning was intelligent.
“Marlon Brando once told me, ‘I’m an artist,'” Alan said. “I told him, ‘I’m an artist too. These are my tools.’ He let me take the picture.”
That exchange may be the clearest distillation of Alan’s philosophy. Alan preferred to wait for the right shot. What mattered was restraint. Alan knew that the best photographs weren’t forced. They appeared, and if you were patient enough, if you were paying attention, you could catch them.
But restraint also meant knowing when not to shoot. Once, Alan approached Paul Newman while the actor was trying to reach a restroom. Newman declined politely, explaining he wouldn’t stop for a photograph under those circumstances. Alan considered following him but didn’t. He respected the boundary. That refusal exemplified his philosophy.
The walls of the barbershop are covered with photographs — decades of Hollywood history, framed and hung in no particular order. Alan pointed to one of Natalie Wood.
“She lost an earring once,” he said. “I found it and gave it back to her. She was so grateful.”
He told me about Tom Hanks, who patiently posed while a crowd gathered around him.
He told me about Chris Farley, who was kind and funny and died too young.
What these stories held were people. Alan remembered the small gestures, the moments of decency, the times when someone treated him like a human being and he returned the favor.
His philosophy worked precisely because it wasn’t sentimental. Alan once photographed Brooke Shields at a Beverly Hills Hotel event. The single image circulated internationally and earned him approximately $37,000. That resulted from positioning himself correctly, asking permission, treating his subject with respect — and getting a photograph that mattered because it was genuine.
Another night, he photographed Jack Nicholson outside Mr. Chow restaurant on Camden Drive. Nicholson was turning over his shoulder in profile, and Alan had positioned himself so that a reflection in the restaurant’s glass created a striking double image. It was the kind of photograph that only appeared if you understood composition, if you knew where to stand, if you were paying attention to the light and the geometry of the moment. Restraint and respect led to excellence, not mediocrity. His method worked because it was built on seeing clearly.
Alan shot on film for most of his career. That meant every frame cost money. Every roll had a limit. You couldn’t just hold down the shutter and hope something good appeared in the sequence. You had to think before you shot.
“You had to see the photograph in your mind first,” Alan said. “You had to know what you were looking for.”
Digital photography changed that. Suddenly, you could take a thousand pictures and delete the bad ones. The cost of failure disappeared. But so did the discipline.
Alan adapted, but he never stopped thinking like a film photographer. He still waited. He still asked permission. He still treated the photograph as something that had to be earned, not extracted. This discipline was possible partly because he wasn’t chasing celebrity out of desperation. He financed much of his collecting and photography through consistent work as a barber, which gave him a dependable income and the independence to pursue photography on his own terms. He had another life, which meant he could afford to be patient.
We had been talking for about two hours when Alan turned the questions around.
“What about you?” he said. “What’s your story?”
I wasn’t expecting that. Most interviews don’t work this way. The subject answers, the writer listens, and the power dynamic stays fixed. But Alan was curious. He wanted to know why I was there, what I was doing in San Pedro, how I ended up writing.
I told him. I told him about losing my job, about moving to San Pedro because it was cheap, about trying to build a writing career while feeling uncertain about everything. I told him about discovering writing in college, about how it was the first thing that made sense to me.
Alan listened. Then he said, “Sometimes you need to be hungry.”
It was an observation, not advice. He’d seen it before — people who found their path only after circumstances forced them onto it. Comfort can delay purpose. Hunger clarifies it.
Alan knew this from his own life. He grew up with an abusive stepfather, and confidence didn’t arrive until his mid-thirties. He understood what it meant to struggle, to feel lost, to have circumstances push you toward something you didn’t yet recognize as your own. His observation came from decades of delayed self-belief and the slow accumulation of work that eventually became a career.
Alan didn’t become the godfather of paparazzi overnight. He showed up. Day after day, year after year. He went to the restaurants, the premieres, the hotels. He positioned himself and waited — eventually, all of it showing up and accumulating into a career.
Listening to Alan describe his career, I couldn’t help noticing the similarity. Photographs accumulate the same way articles do — one assignment at a time.
Before I left, Alan drifted back into another story. Then another. A photograph of Natalie Wood. A memory of Steve McQueen. A restaurant that no longer exists. A celebrity who remembered his name years later.
At 80 years old, Alan Collela still cuts hair in San Pedro. The walls around him are crowded with half a century of photographs, but he speaks about them less as trophies than encounters.
The driver had said it hours earlier.
“He knew where to go before that person moved.”
The abundance of celebrity candids verifies that this is his gift.
Looking around the barbershop, surrounded by half a century of photographs, I realized that knowing where to be had never been about photography. It had been about attention — the willingness to look closely, to wait, to see what was actually in front of you.