Herb Ritts: He Photographed Physical Perfection for 25 Years While Living With a Secret
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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 from almost everyone, including his own mother, who didn't find out until the night he actually died. It's one of the strangest, most human contradictions in modern photography, a man who made his living selling the illusion of perfect bodies while quietly fighting to hold on to his own.
A Furniture Salesman's Son With a Famous Neighbour
Herbert Ritts Jr. was born in Santa Monica on August 13, 1952, to a wealthy Jewish family that had originally gone by the surname Rittigstein before his father anglicized it. Herb Sr. ran a furniture business manufacturing rattan pieces, the same style of furniture that got a huge popularity boost after appearing in Elvis Presley's Blue Hawaii, and the family lived comfortably in a large Brentwood house. Their neighbour was Steve McQueen, who Ritts later described as being like a second father to him, close enough that McQueen actually agreed to host Ritts's high school prom at his own house. Ritts went on to study economics and then art history at Bard College in New York, and by most accounts he never had any formal photography training at all. He simply picked up a camera and started shooting the people around him, first as a hobby while he worked selling furniture and prop pieces to film productions for his father's company.
A Flat Tire, a Gas Station, and a Career
His actual break came almost by accident, in 1976, after he'd bought his first real camera, a 35mm Miranda, for $152. The following year, Ritts was introduced to a struggling, largely unknown actor named Richard Gere through Gere's girlfriend at the time. When she failed to show up for a planned photo session at Ritts's house, Gere came instead, reluctant and shy, with hair down past his shoulders. Ritts photographed him anyway, and later that year the two of them got a flat tire on a desert road trip and ended up shooting more pictures at a roadside gas station in San Bernardino while they waited for it to be fixed.
The photos sat unused until Gere's new publicist convinced him to release them. As Ritts told it years later, three months after that, the pictures appeared in American Vogue, Esquire and Mademoiselle in big spreads, and Mademoiselle then hired him directly to photograph a young Audrey Munson-style ingenue in Brooke Shields. His first national magazine cover followed soon after, Burt Reynolds on the July 1978 issue of After Dark. When Gere's own image from that gas station shoot ended up as the promotional photo for American Gigolo two years later, it helped turn both men into stars at more or less the same moment.
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Poor Fred and the Photograph That Became a Poster
Ritts's signature style, stark black and white, dramatically lit, bodies treated almost like sculpture, crystallized fully in 1984 with a photograph that became one of the most reproduced images of the decade. He'd been booked for an Italian fashion magazine shoot, hated the clothes he'd been sent, and improvised on the spot, dressing his model, a student named Fred, in a pair of overalls and shooting him at a grimy gas station instead. Ritts later described what actually happened in the final frame: poor Fred, worn out from swinging heavy tires around for the camera all day, finally just turned and stood there exhausted, and that accidental, unguarded moment became the shot. The magazine hadn't asked for anything like it, ran it anyway, and Fred with Tires went on to sell as a bestselling poster and became one of the images credited with changing the direction of fashion photography entirely, all before Ritts had turned 32.
Selling Perfection to Everyone Who Could Afford It
From there, Ritts became one of the most in-demand image makers in the world, and not just for magazines. He shot Madonna's True Blue album cover in 1986 and directed her Cherish music video in 1989, then went on to direct videos for Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson, Chris Isaak and later Britney Spears and Jennifer Lopez. His advertising client list included Gap, Calvin Klein, Valentino, Revlon and Victoria's Secret, and in 1994 Pirelli paid him roughly £150,000 to shoot its annual calendar. He also turned his camera on genuine world figures rather than just celebrities, photographing Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Dalai Lama and Ronald Reagan with the same careful, elegant lighting he brought to a supermodel.
His most quietly radical image might be the August 1993 Vanity Fair cover of k.d. lang and Cindy Crawford, shot right after lang had come out publicly and released her album Ingenue, showing lang in a suit while Crawford leaned over and shaved her face with a straight razor. It put an openly gay musician on the cover of a mainstream magazine, dressed and posed with real desire rather than as a novelty, at the height of the AIDS crisis, and it's still considered one of the more memorable images of the decade. Richard Gere later summed up what made the work distinct: his purpose was always to make you look good, Gere said, calling Ritts's aesthetic extremely elegant.
Out, But Not About Everything
Ritts was genuinely open about being gay at a time when very few of his peers in the industry were. He came out publicly on NBC in 1993 and discussed it at length in a 1996 Advocate cover story, and said afterward that he received letters from struggling gay teenagers who'd been moved by seeing him speak so plainly about it. What he never discussed publicly, not in that interview and not anywhere else while he was alive, was that he'd been diagnosed HIV-positive back in 1989. It's a meaningful distinction. He wasn't a closeted man hiding his identity. He was an openly gay public figure who simply decided, for over a decade, that his health was nobody's business but his own.
The Secret Behind the Camera
The small circle who did know included Richard Gere, who Ritts told directly and who later said the two of them just wept like babies together when he found out. Cindy Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor and k.d. lang were also among the handful let in on it, and lang in particular became a close friend outside of work entirely. Ritts kept horses at a mountain property in Santa Fe and named one of them k.d. after her, and she'd visit regularly and cook him vegetarian meals there. It was actually Ritts's mother Shirley who'd originally encouraged him to leave the family furniture business and pursue photography full time, and lang once observed that Herb's got a mother who understands who he is. That's part of what makes it so striking that Shirley, who he was famously close to and protective of, and who understood him well enough to help launch his entire career, still wasn't told about the HIV until the night he actually died. His health stayed relatively stable through the early 1990s, then took a serious turn for the worse in the middle of the decade after he came off AZT in favor of herbal treatments, a decision that let his CD4 count collapse to just four. He started a protease inhibitor cocktail in 1996 and improved significantly, though he also developed CMV retinitis, an AIDS-related eye infection, that required implants and a PICC line running into his arm for roughly five years. By 2002 his CD4 count had climbed back up to around 180, a real recovery, right before everything changed.
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“It Was Like an Ambush”
Ritts was hospitalized for only a few days in December 2002 before he died on December 26, at 50 years old, from complications of pneumonia. His publicist Stephen Huvane was careful to clarify afterward that it wasn't PCP, the pneumonia most associated with AIDS, though Ritts's compromised immune system was still very much a factor. His partner at the time, Erik Hyman, described the speed of it bluntly: it was like an ambush, Hyman said, adding that Ritts had gotten sick so quickly with this crazy, harsh pneumonia that there was barely time to process what was happening before he was gone.
A Foundation Built From What He Never Said Out Loud
Even while keeping his own diagnosis private, Ritts spent real time and money on HIV and AIDS causes throughout his illness. He worked with Gere on research initiatives for amfAR, and quietly donated cameras to communities in Africa affected by the epidemic so people there could document their own lives and experiences, later photographing some of those same communities with the same glamorous, dignified eye he'd once pointed at supermodels and movie stars. After his death, the Herb Ritts Foundation was established to continue that work, supporting both photography and HIV and AIDS initiatives, with Erik Hyman serving as its president. A decade later, in 2012, the Getty Museum mounted a full retrospective called Herb Ritts: L.A. Style, which later traveled to the Cincinnati Art Museum, drawing crowds of people who mostly knew him only from the surface of his pictures. It's a strange kind of legacy for a man who spent his career selling the world an image of flawless, permanent good health: the truest picture of Herb Ritts might not be any of the famous ones on a magazine cover, but the quiet, decade-long act of keeping his own decline entirely out of frame.
