Paparazzi are photographers who take pictures of athletes, celebrities, politicians, and other prominent people usually while they are going about normal life routines.
The word “paparazzi” is an eponym originating in the 1960 film La Dolce Vita directed by Federico Fellini. One of the characters in the film is a news photographer named Paparazzo (played by Walter Santesso). In his book Word and Phrase, Robert Hendrickson writes that Fellini took the name from an Italian dialect word that describes a particularly annoying noise, that of a buzzing mosquito.