Herb Ritts: L.A. Style

Ugh, A Day at the Museum??? 

Exhibit #1: Herb Ritts: L.A. Style 

Day: 4-27-2012

Location: The Getty Center, Los Angeles 

Introduction: Hello bored internet surfers! If you happened to stumble upon my blog, or just love to meander through various blog sites to uncover some treasures, welcome to Ugh, A Day at the Museum???. The purpose of my hopefully fun and stimulating blog is to introduce many youngsters to the wonders of art and the stories these hung canvases and frames have to tell. To reach my goal, I shall implement my AP Art History knowledge, my fancy SAT vocabulary, and my decent blogger charisma to guide readers through my perilous journeys through three museum exhibits in the greater Los Angeles area. My entries will offer humorous and anecdotal, as well educational information about the various exhibits I will be visiting. From Surrealism to Photography, all of my blog readers will gain an enhanced and developed perspective towards how to approach museum exhibits, and of course, the art hanging on their shiny and curated walls. You will love art history and museum going, I guarantee it! 

Let’s start with Herb Ritts shall we? Perched atop the beautiful Bel-Air mountains, just far enough to escape from the smoggy fumes and jagged sounds of the 405 freeway, lies the Getty Center, a pseudo-anciet citadel of limestone, studded with sculptures, paintings, photographs, and gardens that will make any art lover swoon with pleasure and excitement. The Getty Center was my first destination in my list of art institutions to pay a visit to and explore an interesting exhibit they offered: Herb Ritts, L.A. Style. After exiting the german-tourist infused tram up the canyon, I ventured up the Getty’s numerous shallow limestone steps to my final destination, the West pavilion of photography. 

Going into the exhibit, I really did not know what to expect, my wonderful art history teacher from last year recommended that I pay a visit to the Herb Ritts exhibit, setting me off on my journey with an idea of what to expect: fashion photography. Judging from their gimmick photo of a women wearing a flowing designer dress (seen to the left), I expected to see numerous of skinny models pouting and awkwardly arching,  Italian chiffon fabric strewn across their bodies. Boy, was I wrong! 


Herb Ritts: L.A. Style was actually a mesmerizing and intoxicating span of dynamic nudes, contortions, shadows, values, and textures, flowing pristinely across black and white walls, elegantly composing an amazing portfolio belonging to a photography virtuoso: Mr. Herb Ritts.

Before I get too emotional and engrossed, I think some short background information about Herb Ritts and his stylistic as well as technical endeavors in photography might be helpful, as well as a crash course on the development of photography as a commercial and fine art.

Herb Ritts’ (1952–2002) distinctive aesthetic fashioned himself as one of the top commercial and fine art photographers in the late 1970’s and 80’s. Implementing the bright and perpetual California sun, as well as other distinctive facets of life in Los Angeles, Ritts intimate black and white portraiture, and his fresh and innovative approach to fashion and the nude, built up his reputation as one of America’s and the world’s top fashion photographers and portraitists. His bold photographs, pierced with dynamic contrasts, imaginative forms, and exquisite movement, helped to bridge the gap between the fine arts and the commercial and raise photography to a high and imaginative scale. 

However, photography was not always considered as an imaginative and creative medium for artists. Since photography’s novel emergence in 1839, many of the world’s first photographer’s strove to find ways to accurately capture the rapidly industrious and ever-changing world around them. Loius-Jaques-Mande-Daguerre and his invention of the daguerrotype enabled many artists and thirsty enlightenment thinkers during the early 19th century to capture accurate images of their subjects. However many photographers, who wanted to transcend the camera’s ability to simply capture and reproduce an optical image, sought ways to imbue their photographs with artistic and poignant qualities, incorporating artifice and sentiment into their modern medium. 

Simple photographs of historical events became ever poignant in Timothy O’Sullivan’s A Harvest of Death, July 1863. Using the modern and accessible camera to quickly and accurately capture a civil war field strung with bodies, O’Sullivan revolutionized photography’s powers in communications and archiving, bringing many audience face-to-face with the brutalities of war in his unsparing accounts of military life and sacrifice. A simple reportage of events is transformed into a powerful and stylistic canvas of powerful emotion. O’Sullivan used the camera’s flexible easels and portability to render his subjects in innovative angles, using a unique focal point to place the audience on ground level, accompanied by the littered corpses strewn across the desecrated battle-field. 

Movement always posed a challenge to many painters. However with photography, the successive stages of movement and the dynamism of motion can be easily and masterfully captured, seen in Eadweard Muybridge’s Horse Galloping, 1878. Details that were once too quick for the eye to capture are fantastically displayed in a succession of amazing photographs that realistically and stylistically record the fundamentals of motion, actively pulling the viewer through a horse’s every step and stretch on its race towards victory. 

Julia Margaret Cameron, used photography to poignantly and tenderly produce soft and mystical character studies of many well-known fictional and historical figures in the late 19th century. In her mystical photograph Ophelia, Study No. 2, 1867, Cameron played with focus to add and blurry and ethereal tone to her photographs, incorporating artifice to transform a simple photograph of a young women into fine art. It’s also not surprising that later in the 20th century, photography moved towards abstraction, paralleling modernists developments in other media. Edward Weston’s, Nude, 1925 is an innovative and simplistic approach to the modern nude. Only choosing to capture a small segment of the soft and lyrical body, the nude’s soft curves and angles compose an abstract landscape of smooth tissue and skeletal form, positioning his photography on the same fine-arts status along with many modernists and surrealists paintings of the time. 

Phew! Now that you know the basic fundamentals and history of photography. Let us implement our new-found knowledge to evaluate and investigate Herb’s exhibit shall we?

The exhibit was sub-divided into three categories of Herb’s renowned work: fashion photography, the nude, and celebrity portraits. All of these rooms were filled with dozens of amazing photographs that implement both creative abstraction, dynamic motion, and tender portraiture. L.A. Style was truly a comprehensive display of how all these elements of fine art photography can merge into an innovating and invigorating exposition of imagination. 

Wrapped Torso, Los Angeles, 1989 is a beautiful fashion photograph that implements a wide range of matte tones to reveal and conceal a body in a dynamic fashion, immortalizing the Issey Miyake gown in a sea of perpetual folds and curves. Adopting a ballet-like pose and surrounded by a simple, dark backdrop, the model gracefully strides forward in a dress that almost melts into her contours, accentuating the gown’s form fitting qualities in a pose that is both novel, fluid, and artistic. The perpetuating folds in the delicate fabric mimic beautifully delineated brushstrokes, flowing smoothly through a modern-day Nike of Samothrace, a goddess of optimal Hellenistic theatricality. The gap between the commercial and fine-arts in masterfully bridged in Ritts’ incredible fashion photograph. 

Lighting is the star of Ritts’ incredible nude Man with Chain, Los Angeles, 1985. Ritts’ model here is transformed into a work of Baroque sculpted beauty as various nodes of darks and lights strike his body in a dynamic force. A chain vividly warps around his torso, juxtaposing man and machine in one fluid delineation. This guy blew me away in the exhibit, a fabulous example of how the absence of color draws tonal range and texture into focus, presenting a nude of Bernini standards (yea, that great). The drama of the tenebrism and the elegant s-shaped curve of the body is breath-taking and engrossing, I was honestly staring at this picture for a good seven minutes in the exhibit, but it was worth the weird stares and “creeper” comments. 

This photograph of Johnny Depp in 1990 at the wake of his Tim Burton career was my favorite of all of Ritts' celebrity portraits, mainly because of Depp's menacing and playful glance and the smooth shine and glide of his iconic scissor hands. While not exactly as tender as Cameron’s Ophelia, Ritts’ character study of the rising, quirky and imaginative star is just so genuine and great. I mean look at it, how can you not love this guy? 

In all, the Herb Ritts’ L.A. style at the Getty was an amazing and informative exhibit that really helped me reexamine my opinion of photography as an innovative and imaginative form of fine art. Besides their rude security guard’s harsh rebukes regarding photography (none is allowed by the way, for future reference), I strongly recommend paying a visit to the Getty before the exhibit ends in August 26th 2012. 

Well, thats all for now guys!!! Tune in next week when I visit In Wonderland, a women surrealist exhibit at the LACMA! Happy Blog Surfing!