HERB RITTS (1952 – 2002)
Herb Ritts began his photographic career in the late 1970's. Initially, he shot informal portraits of friends in the movie industry and gained a reputation as a master photographer of artists, athletes, political figures, actors, musicians, and fashion personalities. Ritts directed 13 music videos (including those for Madonna, Janet Jackson, and Britney Spears), more than 50 television commercials (for Chanel, Calvin Klein, and Estée Lauder, among others), photographed hundreds of magazine spreads (with almost 40 covers for Vanity Fair alone, as well as numerous covers for VOGUE, Interview, GQ, Rolling Stone, and Newsweek, among others), created advertising campaigns for the world’s leading designers (including Giorgio Armani, Donna Karan, Gianni Versace, Calvin Klein, and Ralph Lauren, among others) and published eight books in his lifetime.
Ritts’ work has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, London, Boston, Vienna, Hamburg, Rome, Tokyo and Milan. His 1996 retrospective exhibition “Herb Ritts: WORK” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston remains one of the most popular exhibitions in the museum’s history, and more recently The Getty Museum in Los Angeles launched the exhibition “Herb Ritts: LA Style”.
Herb Ritts died in Los Angeles in 2002.