04.08.09
Herb Ritts Profile
Herb Ritts was born in 1952, in Santa Monica, the son of a successful furniture manufacturer.
He grew up between a 27-room mansion in Brentwood and another family home on the beach at Catalina. He lived next door to Steve McQueen – who was, according to Ritts, ‘like a second father’. Born an insider, he grew up to be the court photographer of glorious, modern celebrity.
A typical, slightly nerdy rich kid, he started slow and unfocused. He had no photographic training, formal or informal. “Many people who excel are self-taught,” he said at the time of his 1999 retrospective at the Fondation Cartier in Paris.
He took a degree in economics – at that most arty and liberal of universities, Bard College in upstate New York. He told his parents he was gay. He studied art history. He worked for the family, selling prop furniture to movie productions.
So how did he get into the photography game? Well, the story he always told is one of chance. So it’s probably not entirely true. But it’s interesting anyway. He was with his pal Richard Gere, then an actor more in hope than actuality. Their car broke down. While they were waiting for it to be fixed, Ritts took some shots of Gere – arms over head, sweaty, cigarette to lips, a homoeroticist’s dream. “I realized instinctively, even then, you have to go for that moment you’re in.”
Then American Gigolo made a star of Gere and Ritts’ dreamboat black & white of the actor was taken up as an iconic image – because the photographer sent it to Gere’s publicist. Ritts always knew the game – and where to find its top table.
Almost overnight, he was a professional photographer. Soon, he was taken up and nurtured by that great editorial patronne Franca Sozzani – then at Lei magazine and later editor-in-chief of Italian Vogue.
As the 1980s unrolled, Ritts found himself capturing and formulating the new celebrity of the age – a world that borrowed from and leaned on Warhol’s blank-eyed insights about the power and meaning of fame, only without the pop artist’s modernist ironies. Ritts shot them all.
He used a glorious, Angeleno monochrome, so carefully lit and printed that sometimes your heart tells you that your eyes are lying and that it’s really in colour. There’s a kind of wholesomeness to his images, too. There’s an almost archaic positiveness in them – a world before the fall. As if there’d never been such a thing
as AIDS. As if Ritts had never tested HIV-positive.
He created a poetics of the glories of the surface. “His purpose was always to make you look good,” said Gere. Exciting, seductive, irresistible – ‘like gods’, it was said. It’s a vision of a world in which there are only movie stars – even when, as in Ritts’s later charity-driven work, they are actually mud-hut poor Africans.
He became a master of the startling image – a Man Ray for a Vanity Fair world. “I like to abstract what’s in front of me,” he said. A model from behind – bare back, blonde hair twirling like the blades of a fan. Jack Nicholson through a magnifying glass – giving him a kind of elephantiasis of chin and grin.
Like other homosexual photographers, his best portraits were of straight men. His women are gorgeous without ever being sexy. How could they be otherwise? Female sexuality was a language he never learned. Still, that also meant he could photograph a post-brain-op Elizabeth Taylor in sumptuous profile, as a queen of us all.
He moved into the moving image, directing commercials, working with the famous and the beautiful for, amongst others, Revlon, Vidal Sassoon and Victoria’s Secret. He made a few really significant pop videos, for Chris Isaak and Janet Jackson. He shot ad campaigns that shaped the way the late 20th century looked.
He became, and remains, popular way beyond the worlds of photography and glossy magazines.
A mid-1990s show in Boston attracted more than a quarter of a million visitors. He died in 2002, of pneumonia.
Pete Silverton
For more information and to see examples of Herb Ritts work visit www.herbritts.com.
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