Herb Ritts

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Born

Herbert Ritts

August 13, 1952

Los Angeles, California

Died

December 26, 2002 (aged 50)

Los Angeles

Occupation

Photographer

Known for

Black-and-white photography

Herbert Ritts (August 13, 1952 – December 26, 2002) was an American fashion photographer who concentrated on black-and-white photography and portraits in the style of classical Greek sculpture. Consequently some of his more famous pieces are of male and female nudes in what can be called glamour photography.

Early life and career

Celebrity/Fashion photographer. Born into a Jewish family in Los Angeles, California, Ritts began his career working in the family furniture business. After awhile he moved to the East Coast and attended Bard College in New York, where he majored in economics and art history. Later he became interested in photography, when by chance he met a young man in a gas station and decided to photograph him. The young man would later become actor, Richard Gere. The picture gained Ritts some coverage and he began to be more serious about photography.

Later notable photographs

Ritts was considered to be a leading celebrity photographer of the 1980s and 1990s. He later photographed notables such as, Christopher Reeve, Dalai Lama, Elizabeth Taylor, Ronald Reagan, Steven Hawking, Edward Norton, Madonna, Dizzy Gillespie, Annette Benning, Cindy Crawford, and many others. He worked for the magazines, Interview, GQ, Harper's Bazaar, Rolling Stone, Vogue, Vanity Fair and Elle. He published many books on photography for leading fashion designers including, Giorgio Armani, Revlon, Ralph Lauren, Chanel, Gianni Versace and Calvin Klein. From 1996 to 1997 some of his work was displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, attracting more than 253,000 people to the exhibit.