Tag: herb ritts

Herb Ritts – [↖] Female Nude with Black Sand, Hawaii (1989); [↗] Female Nude with Black Sand, Hawaii (1989); [↓] Untitled (1989)

If you’re anything like me you’ll ask yourself: Herb who? You already know him–I promise.

This photo of David Bowie? This photo of Michael Jackson? This one of Britney Spears? All three were made by Herb Ritts.

There’s a good bit of common ground between Ritts and Avedon, actually. Both have the same tendency of thwarting expectations. Working in a studio was less something either did as a means of de-emphasizing location as it was an effort to give personality free range to manifest. Also, both make photos that focus on the subject in the same way–Ritts merely trained his lens on larger than life uber celebrities, house name entertainers and supermodels. (Leveraging recognizability and depicting celebrity personality as its own ultra exclusive destination which you could only access as he allowed was a brilliant maneuver.)

Perusing his catalog is a strange undertaking–where you see the person both as they wanted to be seen at the time the photo was made. At the same time, ex post facto, it’s possible to look at the work and guess what the various PR teams had in mind but there’s also a way in which the work also presents a subtle wink to some of the less pristine aspects of many of his subjects lives–about which we have begun to learn.

I don’t care for Picasso at all but it’s sort of like the critic who took issue with his painting of Gertrude Stein by saying it doesn’t look anything like her and Pablo responding shortly: but it will.

Also, there’s no way to fault Ritts for borrowing so readily from others–as the adage goes it’s not theft if you take something and improve upon it.  It’s difficult to say if stealing Avedon’s formula and applying it to the super rich and famous was an act of genius or not–it just works too well to judge that after the fact.

However, in the case of these photos, it’s easier to see that here he was riffing on Iwase Yoshiyuki. (Although again, he did at least pick something of Yoshiyuki’s that was truly and exquisitely exceptional…)