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elebrities sometimes introduce Kevin
Mazur as “my favorite paparazzo.”
“I go, ‘I’m not paparazzi!’” Mazur said
the other day. “I’m the guy that’s invited.
Everybody wants me to be there.” Mazur
is the guy you get when, say, you’re the
Rolling Stones in 1988 and need some-
one to document the “Steel Wheels” tour.
Or when you’re the Met Gala and need
someone to capture Kim Kardashian at
the top of the stairs. At concerts, he slips
onstage to shoot Elton John close up. On
red carpets, he waltzes past the penned-in
press and snaps J. Lo from two feet away.
“The trust factor is the biggest thing,”
he said. “When you respect somebody,
they’ll feel comfortable with you. And
then they’ll let you in.” Mazur, who is
sixty-one, with swept-back silver hair and
a thick Long Island accent (David Bowie
used to imitate him: “Yo, Kev, come ovah
heah, take some pic-chahs!”), was driv-
ing to Newark for the MTV Video Music
Awards, which he has photographed since- He had just left his house, which is
adorned with his photos of celebrities
(Keef, McCartney) and of himself with
celebrities (“That’s Sting on my boat”).
Mazur lives in Babylon, not far from
where he grew up, a fireman’s son. His
first concert was Led Zeppelin—Madison
Square Garden, 1977—where he learned
how to scalp tickets. Not long afterward,
he took his girlfriend to see Fleetwood
Mac and hid his camera in her purse.
“Instead of sneaking in booze and get-
ting drunk, I had pictures,” he recalled.
In 1982, after taking audience shots
of a Billy Joel concert, he submitted his
photos to Retna, the photo agency; a
week later, one of them was in People.
He co-founded WireImage in 2001 and
rode the Paris Hilton boom times, be-
fore Getty Images acquired the company
(and Mazur), in 2007. Unlike the paps,
who sell shots of Ben Affleck looking
depressed at Starbucks to the Daily Mail,
Mazur maintains access by getting along
with everyone. “I never put out a bad
picture of anybody,” he said. He was the
first to shoot inside Paisley Park (he used
to talk basketball with Prince) and the
last to shoot Michael Jackson alive. Bob
Dylan made one of Mazur’s portraits
the cover of “Love and Theft.” This year,
his photos of Lady Gaga’s tour opening,
in Düsseldorf, were seen in print and
online outlets by more than two billion
people. Mazur is a classic-rock guy, but
his four twentysomething kids keep him
up to date on new acts; after seeing
Olivia Rodrigo sing a line about “Up-
town Girl,” he helped connect her toBilly Joel, and they duetted at the Garden.
At the Prudential Center, in Newark,
Mazur wandered the backstage hallways.
On the concert floor, he watched Nicki
Minaj and Eminem rehearse. Stand-ins
delivered dummy acceptance speeches.
Mazur sized up the zigzagging stage,
trying to determine where to station
himself. The Red Hot Chili Peppers
wanted a backstage photo with Cheech
and Chong: which exit? Just after five,
Mazur checked in with a room of Getty
editors on laptops, who would distrib-
ute his images in real time. (He expected
to take three to four thousand photos.)
“Anybody on the carpet yet?” he asked.
“Oh, Lizzo—shit, I gotta get out there.”
Out on the red carpet, with threeU.S., with three other female soldiers,
was to ask Congress for more HIMARS,
armored vehicles, long-range rockets,
heavy armor, and air-defense systems.
She brought souvenirs from Ukraine to
hand out at meetings—shards of de-
stroyed Russian tanks. Her husband,
Peter, a soldier in her unit, asked her to
bring him back some Marlboros.
Chornohuz is also a poet, and she
worked as a translator in a publishing
house while getting her master’s degree
in Kyiv. “I did books like ‘The Girl
Who Saved Christmas,’ from English
to Ukrainian,” she said. She was an ac-
tivist in Maidan in 2014, but she couldn’t
join the armed forces because she was
pregnant. “I gave birth the day the war
in Crimea officially started,” she said.
“Then, in 2020, when my daughter was
six, my boyfriend was killed by a Rus-
sian sniper.” She said that she could
survive his loss only by joining the
armed forces.
“We were used to trench warfare,”
she said. “When full-scale war started,
my ex-husband took my daughter to
live in the U.S. I was on the front lines
and I couldn’t leave.”
At a brunch place in Chelsea, she sat
beneath a neon-green sign reading
“Home for the Holidays” and asked for
a matcha latte. “Now I’m used to field
conditions. Usually it’s basements,
trenches, abandoned houses from civil-
ians that the local government gave to
us. Sometimes I sleep in my car.” She
said that she found the white sheets in
her Washington hotel shocking.
She looked at the menu and ordered
a “wellness bowl.” “After thirteen months,
you require some civilian things,” she
said. “I have my coffeepot. My husband
and I order each other stuffed animals.”
She went on, “When we were in an oc-
cupied frontline village, I went to the
town library, and I found a few books
by dissidents, a few from a school of
Ukrainian poets from the thirties.” She
orders books online, and when they ar-
rive at her home people bring them to
her in the field. “When I’m at the front,
I’m reading O. Henry,” she said.
In January, 2021, she published a cycle
of wartime poems called “How the War
Circle Bends.” She posts her poems on
social media, alongside photos. “We can’t
use geotags, or show the horizon,” she
said. “I don’t want to be like those
Kevin MazurChechen guys we make fun of, who are
cosplaying American sniper movies in
their TikTok videos.” She added, “I can
speak with my daughter on video from
my position. She’s, like, ‘Finish your con-
tract, Mom, then we’ll do something.’”
—Antonia Hitchens