HERB RITTS: L.A. STYLE

Dr. Matthew McLendon Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

The name Herb Ritts is synonymous with a particular kind of glamour—a glamour as casual as the soft California sun that he so skillfully used to make his supermodel muses glow. In the minimalist backlash of the 1990s, Ritts’s photographs projected a languid feeling of nonchalance as the fashion celebrities he helped to create, Stephanie, Cindy, Naomi, Christy, Tatjana, appeared effortlessly beautiful. Faces rouged within an inch of their lives and hair moussed to the heavens, the look of the 1980s, was replaced with clear, perfect complexions, hair slicked back as if just stepping out of the shower, and countenances that were at once both innocent and sultry. This was the Ritts aesthetic.

From the mid 1980s, it was impossible not to see the work of Herb Ritts. His photographs graced the covers of countless magazines; he was an integral part of the styling of even more editorial fashion spreads, and he directed music videos for the top industry performers. Ritts not only defined, he embodied his age.

Growing up in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, my rapidly evolving aesthetic sense was immeasurably influenced by Herb Ritts--even before I knew who he was. In my rural North Florida hometown, Ritts’s photographs gave me a vision and promise of an ideal, urban aesthetic populated by demigods, a utopia that I am still chasing. His spare, architectonic compositions and perfectly toned models continue to be personal measures of beauty that inform my own aesthetic choices. So for these reasons, Herb Ritts: L.A. Style is an exhibition that is particularly near to my heart.

While Ritts was a key force within the fashion industry, Paul Martineau’s exhibi- tion deftly demonstrates that Ritts not only straddled the line between high and commercial art, but many times he erased it all together, producing work not easily categorized in conventional terms. Following in the tradition of Andy Warhol, Ritts celebrated and augmented the role of the celebrity within our culture and, like Warhol, used the celebrity to redefine aesthetic boundaries. As the exhibition also illustrates through the inclusion of a number of important, mostly male, figural studies, Ritts was working within and continuing a tradition of the photographic investigation of the human body as sculptural object. This body of work, indebted to the Pictorialists, Surrealists, and more recent photographers like Robert Mapplethorpe, shows that Ritts was fully aware of his place within the history of photography and that he desired to leave his indelible mark upon that history.

In Herb Ritts: L.A. Style, I think you will find many images that will bring sense memories flooding back to you. Herb Ritts provided the backdrop to so much of our lives during his career, that even if you were not aware of the authorship of the image, you will certainly remember the look and feel of it. Like so many of our creative geniuses of the late 20th century, Ritts’s career was cut short by AIDS. However, as Herb Ritts: L.A. Style proves, this singular photographer defined his era and continues to exert a powerful influence on our aesthetics today.