For 25 years, Herb Ritts built his entire career on physical perfection. He photographed the most idealized bodies in the world, supermodels glistening in black and white, Madonna at her most sculpted, an unknown actor named Richard Gere looking like a god at a gas station, and sold that vision of flawless health to magazines, movie studios and advertising agencies across the planet. The whole time, for well over a decade of it, he was quietly living with HIV, a fact he hid f

Before it had emperors, movie stars and one of Weimar Berlin's most scandalous dancers in front of its lens, the Atelier d'Ora was just one woman's stubborn bet on herself. Dora Kallmus opened it in Vienna in 1907, at a time when formal photography training simply wasn't available to women, and built it into the most fashionable portrait studio in the city with the help of a technician named Arthur Benda who eventually got his own name on the door. For twenty years the studio

Tempest Storm spent almost 60 years on stage, but her offstage life reads like a highlight reel of mid-century America's most dangerous men. She danced her way from a Georgia cotton farm to the top of the Vegas Strip, and along the way she wound up in the arms of a president-to-be, the King of Rock and Roll, and one of Los Angeles' most feared gangsters. She outlived pretty much all of them, and she never stopped talking about it. A Hard Start in Dodge County, Georgia She was