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, and they are 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, Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson. He shot portraits for Vogue, Vanity Fair, Interview, and Rolling Stone. He was, for a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the most employed photographer in America.

The commercial work and the fine art work feed each other. His fashion images have the formal quality of his gallery work; his gallery work has 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, and his sexuality is visible in his work in the way that 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 genuinely 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 Archive

Ritts died in 2002, from complications related to pneumonia, at fifty. He had been HIV-positive for years and had not made it public. 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.

Why He Matters for BoysDo

BoysDo is a platform that treats the male body as a subject worthy of serious aesthetic attention. Ritts is the photographer who made that argument most legibly to a mainstream audience — who took the classical tradition, the genuine inheritance of centuries of serious looking at the male form, and made it available in a contemporary idiom.

He made beauty look inevitable. He made the male body look as if it had always been a legitimate subject for this quality of attention. For viewers who came to BoysDo already knowing Ritts's work, the platform will feel familiar: this is the continuation of something that has always been true about what men find beautiful.

The tradition is long. The gallery is still open.