Herb Ritts: The Classical Gaze

The California Formation

Ritts was born in Los Angeles in 1952, the son of a furniture-company executive, and grew up in the industry-adjacent, sun-saturated milieu of mid-century LA. He studied economics at Bard College in New York and returned to California with no formal photography training and a borrowed camera.

The borrowed camera was a practical necessity. In 1978, his car broke down in the Mojave Desert while he was travelling with a friend named Richard Gere, who was not yet famous but was about to be. Ritts photographed Gere at a service station in the desert light — the images are beautiful, relaxed, completely without the self-consciousness that would later attend almost any image made of Richard Gere — and the photographs got published, and his career was suddenly underway.

The accident of it — the broken-down car, the desert light, the friend who happened to be on his way to becoming a movie star — is its own kind of Californian origin story.

The Black-and-White Classicism

The signature Ritts image is in black and white, shot outdoors, with natural light that models the body the way studio light models it for other photographers: precisely, with full awareness of shadow and form. His subjects — male models, musicians, actors — are typically shirtless and frequently naked, photographed against landscapes (desert, ocean, sky) or plain backgrounds that remove them from any specific time or place.

The effect is classical in the art-historical sense. These images quote, consciously or not, the tradition of ancient Greek sculpture, the Renaissance ideal of the male body as the measure of all things, the centuries of Western art that devoted itself to the male form as an object of serious aesthetic contemplation. Ritts absorbed this tradition and made it live again in the bodies of young men in Malibu and Santa Monica.

This was not naive pastiche. It was a genuine formal achievement: the application of historical aesthetic intelligence to contemporary subjects, and the insistence that the contemporary subjects could bear that weight.

The Fashion Dimension

Ritts's fine art work is inseparable from his commercial career, which he made no attempt to separate. He shot campaigns for Armani, Donna Karan, Gap, Versace. He made music videos for Madonna ("Cherish"), Janet Jackson ("Love Will Never Do (Without You)"), Michael Jackson ("In the Closet"). He shot portraits for Vogue, Vanity Fair, Interview, and Rolling Stone. For a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s he was the most employed photographer in America.

The commercial work and the fine art work fed each other. His fashion images had the formal quality of his gallery work; his gallery work had the surface beauty of his best commercial photography. He did not believe these were different activities, and the body of work he left bears him out.

The Gay Dimension

Ritts was gay. His sexuality is visible in his work in the way that Wolfgang Tillmans's is — not as subject matter, necessarily, but as the quality of attention the camera brings. He photographed male bodies with a care and a specificity that is the mark of genuine desire: the interest is not general but particular, not in bodies as a category but in this body, this light, this morning.

He was not publicly out in the way that later generations of gay photographers would be, and he was not explicitly erotic in his imagery in the way that Mapplethorpe was. His homoerotic charge operates at the level of the gaze itself rather than the content: it is there in the decision to photograph this man in this way, to spend this much time on this detail, to return to the male body as a subject with the consistency and commitment of someone who finds it inexhaustible.

His closest peer in this respect is Bruce Weber — both men operating in commercial photography, both men bringing a clearly homoerotic sensibility to mainstream contexts, both men remaining, in their public statements, somewhat oblique about what was evident in the work. The two careers, taken together, are most of the argument for what an out-but-coded American commercial photography of the male body looked like in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Death

Ritts died in Los Angeles on December 26, 2002, at fifty. The official cause was complications from pneumonia. He had been HIV-positive for years and had not made it public, and the pneumonia was almost certainly pneumocystis pneumonia — the AIDS-defining opportunistic infection that killed Mapplethorpe in 1989 and a long list of other photographers, artists, designers and dancers in the period the press was still discreetly describing as "complications related to pneumonia."

It is worth being plain about this now in a way the obituaries of the time were not. Ritts is part of the same generational loss that took Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz, Tseng Kwong Chi, and dozens of the other photographers who would otherwise have shaped the next twenty years of the medium. The fact that he had spent his career producing images of luminous physical beauty does not change the cause of his death. The shape of his archive was determined, in the end, by the same epidemic that determined the shape of the photographic field he worked inside.

The archive he left — housed in part at the Herb Ritts Foundation in Los Angeles — is enormous: hundreds of thousands of images, across forty years of one of the most productive careers in American photography. The retrospective Work (1996) remains the most comprehensive single-volume survey of his career and is the right place to start.

The Inheritance

Ritts is the photographer who made the classical tradition — the genuine inheritance of centuries of serious looking at the male form — available again in a contemporary American idiom. He took the male body, photographed it the way Greek sculpture had taught him to, and put the result on the cover of magazines, in music videos, on the walls of museums, and in commercial campaigns that sold jeans and watches and cologne at industrial scale. The argument that the gay male gaze deserved this kind of formal attention was being made, simultaneously, by Mapplethorpe in galleries; Ritts made it in the mainstream press.

Both arguments mattered. Both photographers died of AIDS. The history of late twentieth century photography of the male body is, among other things, the history of who lived through the epidemic and who didn't. Ritts didn't.

BoysDo is part of the inheritance. The tradition of taking the male body seriously as a photographic subject, of bringing classical attention to contemporary skin, is what the platform exists to continue. The gallery is open in part because of who kept it open during the years that took most of Ritts's generation.