Herb Ritts
Herb Ritts is one of my favorite photographers. Photography is a medium that I have a passion for & Ritts was a master. He was a classicist in the manner of the great George Platt Lynes & George Hurrell, but he had a contemporary spin on portraiture & yet none of the settings & color of Annie Lebowitz. I love the work & admire all the artists I have mentioned, along with Helmut Newton & Bruce Weber, but Herb Ritts was a gay man of my generation & his work & subjects speak to me. Interestingly, Ritts was self taught.
Herb Ritts grew up in Beverly Hills with movie stars as neighbors & as a child his neighbor Steve McQueen would take him on rides on the back of his motorcycle. His images celebrated the beauty of the human body, especially the male body & created stylish, unorthodox portraits of celebrities. Ritts gained the same sort of renown as his subjects & he achieved nearly as much fame as those he photographed. His work graced not only the covers & photo spreads of such magazines as Vogue, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Elle, & Harper’s Bazaar, but also album covers, advertisements, television commercials, & music videos.. Ritts claimed that his success in black & white photography stemmed from a photograph he happened to take of his friend Richard Gere while they were waiting for a tire to be changed in the California desert. That photo was ultimately used for publicity when Gere starred in American Gigolo (1980), & both men’s careers received an enormous boost.
Several anthologies of Ritts’s works have been published: Men/Women (1989), Notorious (1992), Africa (1994), Work (1997), & Herb Ritts (2000). Major retrospectives of his work were held in Boston at the Museum of Fine Arts in 1996–97 & in Paris in 2000. Ritts was always candid about his own sexuality. He realized that he was gay while he was in college. He soon came out to his parents, who were accepting & supportive. In 1993, he appeared on an NBC special- The Gay 90s. After the special aired he received many letters from gay young people about coming out. Ritts claimed that he never set out to be a role model & said- “you get some of these letters & realize how important it is that there be encouragement for young gay people.”
Ritts died in Los Angeles from HIV pneumonia-related complications in December 2002 at 50 years old. He left behind his partner Erik Hyman, an entertainment lawyer.
"Some photographers embalm their subjects, but he enlivened them." Richard Gere
Is he the cracker guy? I love them with cheese.
ReplyDeletewhat beautiful pics, and his quote, priceless...a wonderful tribute.
ReplyDeleteSteven Anthony
http://manndish.blogspot.com/
His work is truly spectacular. What an eye for form and function.
ReplyDeleteSomething like 15 years ago the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston mounted a major Ritts exhibit called Herb Ritts: Work. A goodly portion of the Trustees was scandalized first, because the considered his work overtly homoerotic and pornographic and second, because it was photography which they considered beneath consideration at a major museum of the fine arts.
ReplyDeleteThe museum scored a huge hit with its target audience which was the younger museum goer/donor, and was willing to deal with the wrath of the Trustees to get some young people for a change.
I was asked to design the Young Patrons Reception and decorated the large space between the three galleries of the exhibit and the Museum Shop as a photographer's studio including as many oversized props (truck tires, big weathered chain, assorted scrap metal) as I could find that were to be seen in Ritts' photos. I had a lot of fun with it.
Many of the photos were enormous, requiring many strips of photographic paper carefully connected. My absolute favorite was a huge portrait of Christopher Reeve, seated profile in his wheel chair, the sheer size of the image giving it an heroic, triumphant aspect. Brilliant work.
One of my clients owns several Ritts originals, and I consider myself very lucky to have opportunity to see them "up close and personal" on a regular basis.
ReplyDeleteSuch BRILLIANT work!
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