Ritts

Herb Ritts (1952-2002). American photographer. Born in Los Angeles, he went to New York to study economics and art history, but then he returned to California to work for his father’s furniture manufacturing business. Photography represented for him a passion refined by his own self-education but also an acute artistic sensibility: this led him to publish his first photographs in Newsweek. In 1978, he used a gas station in the desert as a set for pictures that he took of a friend of his, a still unknown young actor, Richard Gere, who would soon afterward become spectacularly famous. Vogue USA bought the photo session and commissioned Ritts to do a photo session on Brooke Shields, introducing him into a mechanism whereby he became the best-loved photographer of the star system, sought after by actors and top models. His style is characterized by sharply contrasting blacks and whites in which beauty and seduction dominate, but also a sensibility that is particularly attentive to the evolution of contemporary taste and aesthetics. He thus went on to do photographs of great sensuality, utilizing such natural elements as water, sand, and mud to create unprecedented body effects: this is a product of his self-educated approach and his perfect knowledge of the places in which he sets his photography, open spaces, desert, natural locations. Although he never wanted to be trapped in a single genre, Herb Ritts became famous for his portraits of actors and actresses, even in difficult situations, as revealed by his photograph of the late Christopher Reeve in his wheelchair, of the Dalai Lama and politicians such as Ronald Reagan, and for the videoclips of Madonna (for whom he also shot the covers of Like a Prayer and True Blue), Michael Jackson and Chris Isaak. He has published a number of books: Men, Women (1986), Duo (1991, with the subject of a gay bodybuilder couple) and Africa (1994), in which the protagonists were not only models, but also women and warriors of the Masai tribe. The transition to fashion was obligatory: layouts in GQ, Vogue, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Interview, Mademoiselle, and Esquire. Among his clients are Giorgio Armani, Calvin Klein and Donna Karan. He photographed two refined Pirelli calendars: in 1994, setting color photographs of Karen Alexander, Melena Christensen, Cindy Crawford and Kate Moss in the Bahamas, and in 1999 by creating in the studio and ideal historic progression in black and white that began with the Belle Epoque, revisiting past decade by decade and culminating with a powerful image of a dark and shiny female nude that represents the future.