Herb Ritts Biography Quotes 21 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background
Herbert Ritts Jr. was born on August 13, 1952, in Los Angeles, California, and grew up with the particular visual weather of Southern California in his eyes - hard sun, long shadows, pale stucco, ocean haze. His family owned a furniture business, and the young Ritts absorbed an everyday training in proportion, surface, and how objects read in space. That early environment mattered: his later photographs would often feel as if they were carved by light, with bodies treated like architecture and glamour stripped to its underlying geometry.

Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s offered him a double education: the lingering studio mythology of Hollywood and the more casual, beach-driven culture of Malibu and the canyons. Ritts moved easily within that world, where celebrity could be encountered as a neighbor before it became an industry appointment. The ease of access did not automatically produce an artist; it produced, rather, an observer who learned how quickly images turn into currency in America, and how easily desire, aspiration, and self-invention attach themselves to a face.

Education and Formative Influences
Ritts attended Palisades High School and studied at Bard College in New York before returning to Los Angeles to graduate from the University of Southern California, where he was an economics major. The discipline of economics and the day-to-day pragmatism of a family business sharpened his sense of systems: how taste is manufactured, how markets reward repetition, and how a personal "signature" becomes a brand. That practical intelligence later helped him navigate the high-speed ecosystem of magazines, fashion houses, record labels, and galleries without surrendering control of his working method.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points
Ritts began photographing friends and local figures, but the catalytic moment came in 1978 when he photographed Richard Gere in the desert near Los Angeles - an accidental session prompted by a broken-down car that became an image of rugged, modern American masculinity. The picture opened doors to magazine work and, soon, a career that fused editorial fashion, celebrity portraiture, and fine-art exhibition. Through the 1980s and 1990s his images appeared in Vogue, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and major ad campaigns, while his studio output defined a clean, sculptural classicism for brands such as Calvin Klein and Giorgio Armani. Parallel to still photography, he directed music videos for leading pop artists, extending his control of light and bodily pose into motion. By the late 1990s his work was widely collected and exhibited, even as his health declined; Ritts died on December 26, 2002, in Los Angeles, from complications related to AIDS, closing a career that had helped reset the visual vocabulary of late-20th-century fame.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes
Ritts spoke about craft in terms that were both humble and exacting, and his discipline shows in the sleek inevitability of his best photographs. He insisted that seeing is a muscle, not a gift, and that refinement comes from repetition and hard choices: "For me, the most important thing I learned was just honing my eye. I think I had a good eye". That statement captures his inner stance - confident enough to claim instinct, anxious enough to keep sharpening it. His workflow was famously controlled, with rigorous selection and printing that treated the contact sheet as a moral test of taste: "I'm pretty selective. I generally edit the contact sheets and then do work prints. Because I have my own lab and printers, I can afford the luxury of going through the contact sheets for black-and-white, making up work prints, seeing them big, and honing them down". The psychology behind the method is clear: he did not trust immediacy; he trusted accumulation, comparison, and the slow narrowing toward the essential image.

Stylistically, Ritts married classical sculpture to modern celebrity, using bright sun or high-key studio lighting to produce a legible, almost monumental clarity. He was drawn to bodies not as gossip but as design - shoulders, torsos, and cheekbones as structural elements - which he summarized bluntly: "I like form and shape and strength in pictures". That preference shaped his most recognizable themes: the athletic body, the eroticized silhouette, the poised face emptied of narrative so it could become icon. Yet the erotic charge in his work often carried a democratic undertone, especially in his depictions of men, where power and vulnerability could occupy the same frame. In an era when mass culture both commodified and policed sexuality, his calm attention to male beauty functioned as a quiet insistence that desire could be formal, unapologetic, and composed.

Legacy and Influence
Ritts left a template for "timeless" modern glamour: black-and-white portraits and nudes that feel simultaneously contemporary and antique, as if Hollywood publicity stills had been purified through classical statuary. He influenced subsequent generations of fashion and celebrity photographers by proving that commercial assignments could still bear the stamp of fine-art intention - in lighting, printing standards, and the disciplined reduction of an image to its strongest shape. His photographs endure because they are not merely about who is pictured; they are about how a culture manufactures icons, and how an artist, with patience and control, can make that machinery produce something enduringly beautiful.

Our collection contains 21 quotes who is written by Herb, under the main topics: Learning - Art - Equality - Confidence - Career.

Other people realated to Herb: Eva Herzigova (Model), Kevyn Aucoin (Artist), Christy Turlington (Model), Cindy Crawford (Model), Helena Christensen (Model), Naomi Campbell (Model), Mark Wahlberg (Actor), Amber Valletta (Model), Paulina Porizkova (Model), Claudia Schiffer (Model)

• 2012 Herb Ritts: L.A. Style (Book)
• 2010 Herb Ritts: The Golden Hour (Book)
• 1996 Work (Book)
• 1992 Notorious (Book)
• 1989 Men/Women (Book)
• 1988 Pictures (Book)

• Wikipedia