Herb Ritts Photography

By Kasia Dybowska Senior Editor

erb Ritts is very much an image maker for our time, a photographer whose assured eye, fertile imagination, and affirmative spirit translate our culture's dreams and desires into strong, memorable pictures. As a photographer of fashion and celebrity, Ritts has created memorable covers and spreads for Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Rolling Stone, among others, as well as album covers, movie advertisements, music videos, and commercials.

Ritts is drawn to clean, pure lines and strong forms; the simplicity of his images allows them to be read and felt instantaneously. In the picture Backflip, the somersaulting body folds into a flat, symmetrical shape, making it both an abstract design as well as a solid athletic body suspended in space.

For Ritts the nude is a central subject. Ritts' images of models, of athletes and bodybuilders, of Maasai women in Africa- celebrate the human body as a strong, sensuous, and beautiful. Ritts is able to evoke the essence of surface textures, showing the body flecked with grains of sand, veiled in sheer fabric, caked with drying mud, or exposed to cascading water. While some figures accentuate the male or female identity, in other images the emphasis is on the shapes of limbs and muscles or the tender connection of intertwined bodies.

Ritts' portraits of famous figures, from Madonna to Dizzy Gillespie, often have a whimsical quality, creating the sense of an intimate encounter with a larger-than-life personality. Ritts presents some subjects in terms of their trademark features or associations, transforming a personal detail into an emblematic symbol: Elizabeth Taylor's eyes and diamond,Dizzy Gillespie's cheek, and comedian Sandra Bernhard represented by only her open mouth.

At other times, Ritts catches us off guard with an unexpected twist. Madonna is renowned for both her glamour and her outrageousness, and Ritts captures these elements in pictures of her vamping as a classic sex goddess and acting playful in Mickey Mouse ears.

As critic Ingrid Sischy says in the exhibition catalog, to create the celebrity images Ritts makes, "you have to be savvy on all fronts...you have to be a diplomat, a psychologist, a playmate, and a great persuader... Because he has such a natural grasp of [all this], as well as of all the technical aspects, Ritts can pull off the equivalent of miracles- photographs that become icons."

The Herb Ritts exhibit is now being displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MASS. The exhibition opened on October 22, 1996 and will remain at the Museum of Fine Arts till February 9, 1997. The exhibition is free with Museum admission of $10 per adult ticket. For more information, you can call the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston at 617-267-9300.