Book: Notorious

Overview
Notorious collects a powerful selection of Herb Ritts's most recognizable photographs from the late 1980s and early 1990s, presenting an arresting vision of celebrity, beauty, and elemental form. The book pairs rugged, natural environments with sleek, studio-like restraint, creating images that feel both timeless and of their moment. Ritts's photographs assert a confident simplicity, reducing portraiture to silhouette, gesture, and light.

Visual Style and Themes
The images emphasize sculptural line and tonal clarity, most often rendered in rich black-and-white that heightens contrast and surface. There is a classical sensibility to the compositions: bodies posed like statuary, faces turned toward a single source of light, and negative space used as deliberately as the subject. Ritts consistently explores an interplay between vulnerability and strength, where glamour coexists with the raw textures of rock, sand, and sea.

Subjects and Iconic Images
Photographs of models, actors, and musicians populate the pages, rendered with an intimacy that made many of these portraits cultural touchstones. Whether photographed against sweeping desert vistas or in spare studio settings, the subjects are presented without clutter, their physical presence occupying the frame with quiet authority. The book includes images that helped define the public faces of the era and contributed to the mythology of celebrity by treating stars as modern archetypes.

Photographic Technique
Ritts's command of light and shadow is central to the book's impact. He often favored strong directional lighting that carved muscles and bone structure into dramatic relief, and he used compositional restraint to emphasize rhythm and balance. The photographer's choices, clean backgrounds, careful cropping, and an economy of props, allow formal elements like line, texture, and silhouette to dominate, producing images that read equally as fashion photography and portraiture.

Design and Presentation
The book pairs generous reproductions with minimal text, letting the photographs dictate tone and narrative. Sequencing subtly moves between open-air tableaux and tightly controlled studio portraits, creating a visual dialogue about context and persona. High-quality printing and attention to tonal range preserve the richness of Ritts's monochrome work, allowing subtle gradations and deep blacks to register on the page.

Legacy and Influence
Notorious captures a moment when fashion photography crossed fully into the realm of popular visual culture, helping to shape how celebrity was seen and circulated. Ritts's aesthetic, clean, muscular, and often heroic, has influenced generations of photographers and remains a reference point for portraitists and commercial artists. The images endure because they balance immediacy with classicism, offering portraits that are at once of their time and strikingly perennial.