There’s a hobby about which—according to one of its practitioners—“95 per cent of people on the planet” know nothing; but the same mired-in-obscurity hobby involves unparalleled brushes with the famous.
Take that same practitioner, and flick through his Facebook albums: he poses here with bombshell A-lister, Amanda Seyfried; here, he points at a pre-Spiderman Tom Holland, who points back; and here, tilting his head back in a dusky, glamorous selfie, he poses with Hailee Steinfeld—who may or may not be getting into a black cab and who’s smiling, polite-earnest-sceptical.
It’s an uncanny valley of a photo collection, a gallery of hyperreal personae (Jessica Chastain, Mark Wahlberg, Arnold Schwarzenegger), each posing candidly with an unknown man whose “some guy” vibe, by an alchemy of repetition, gives way to odd mystique.
The photo collection, no Photoshop or deepfake trick, is a product of dedication to what the unknown man, Pablo, has called “the best hobby on earth”: racking.
The hobby, whose name (I guess) refers to racking up, sees practitioners hunt down, and acquire selfies with, celebrities as if they were Pokémon. Racking involves the thrill of getting a picture with a real A-lister, and the charm of getting it in a particular place (a premiere, an afterparty, the stage door of a studio), and the rush of getting someone who’s elusive. Rackers’ references to particularly “hard” celebrities, like Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera, put one in mind of the Pokémon shiny.
Racking’s a hobby apparently under-documented online, maybe because it’s overshadowed by the paparazzo function. But a paparazzo takes photos for money, while a racker takes photos because he likes or admires the celebrities, for their work, personality or looks.
Pablo’s racking experience began before the modern conception of “online,” with its connotations of social media and internet porn. When he first got into the hobby, sex shops were a big thing. These, along with drug addicts, had been driven out of Times Square via zoning laws in the 1990s to make way for the likes of a Virgin Megastore and new MTV studio, through whose floor-to-ceiling windows, one day in 1999, waved Total Request Live (TRL) host Carson Daly at an adoring crowd streetside including Pablo and his cousins. Even though one of the music video countdown show’s special guests that day was Savage Garden (not among Pablo’s favourite bands), the thrill was addictive, and Pablo would be back.
In 2006, he photographed Seth Green as the latter left TRL towers. The Austin Powers star was Pablo’s first photo with a celebrity, and part of an initial three-photos-and-a-‘graph group that predated Pablo’s serious engagement with the racking hobby.
The other two photos in the group were Jon Voight, randomly run into on the corner of 6th and 54th; and David Blaine who, in front of the Lincoln Center, posed from within a water-filled sphere as part of “Drowned Alive.” The autograph, supplied two years later in 2008 by Billy Crystal, was got outside the Ed Sullivan Theater, where they were taping the Late Show with David Letterman.
By September of 2009, Pablo had 84 photos with celebrities. In his next racking period, for about three months between May and August 2010, he brought the total up to 200. The flood began on the “epic, historic day” of May 11, 2009, when—by his own admission “kinda bored”—Pablo ventured back to the Ed Sullivan Theater. There he met a new friend, who invited him to come to the SNL studios in Rockefeller Center to try for Andy Sandberg. Although Sandberg never appeared, Jane Krakowski did. More racking friends were met as well, including one, Mark of St Louis, who let Pablo in on plans to attend a separate event that night in a bid to photograph Tim Robbins and Amber Tamblyn. Pablo travelled with Mark and friends on the subway, and was slightly shy asking them to take photos of him with the celebs, but “we’ll switch cameras, that’s how we do it,” they said. Sure enough, Pablo got Robbins and Tamblyn that day; that was the day he officially started racking.
Friend after friend after friend; soon, photo after photo after photo. The milieu had been joined. The new initiate was warned by Mark that racking would get under his skin. “My wife says there’s a thin line between a hobby and mental illness,” Mark added. They took him to Broadway shortly afterwards, where he “got” Geoffrey Rush—this Pokéball lexicon—and Alfred Molina followed, plus many others. “I kinda did it constantly with [my racking partners],” says Pablo, until September of that year and the 84-photo milestone.
For attending one shoot on-location, that of Get Him To The Greek, Pablo and a friend appear as crowd extras in the film. The premieres were happy events: you got free popcorn and drinks, got to watch the whole movie for free, and take photos of rare celebrities, who were more likely to agree to photos because all eyes were on them. Pablo’s premiere cherry was popped in December 2010, when he got tickets to The Tourist (the romantic thriller). He got Jennifer Connelly that night, and Paul Bettany.
The Golden Globes, the Oscars, the VMAs, and a whole host of fashion shows were among the events attended by Pablo to rack up a collection of celebrity photos that now numbers more than 2000. And for all its excitement, Pablo’s is just one story among many within that world. He’s part of an ensemble cast of hobbyists who channel their love of celebrities into the “best hobby on earth”: racking.
