shockYa: If, as Susan Sontag once opined, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is, then the fever-grip that the intimacy of celebrity tabloid photography exerts is, on a psychological level, an entirely understandable phenomenon. Still, in a society with broad freedoms of expression and the press, the junction of those liberties and personal privacy is a messy, complicated one. The documentary “$ellebrity” digs into that arguably symbiotic relationship between jostling, freelance photographers and their famous, sometimes unwitting subjects — examining celebrity culture, the increasingly bold intrusiveness of the paparazzi, and the jumbled intersection of authorized and unauthorized image management.
