oh wow, do you really? sorry about that!
in case anyone really cares, i copied and pasted the article here. (i will be honest, i didnt read past the 2nd paragraph!)
![]()
__________________________________________
Famed Photographer Herb Ritts Dies in L.A.
By REUTERS
Filed at 8:50 p.m. ET
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Fashion and celebrity photographer Herb Ritts, whose spare, crisp images caught everything from spirituality expressed in the Dalai Lama's hands to the athletic power of Jackie Joyner-Kersee's legs, died on Thursday at age 50, a spokesman said.
Ritts died of complications of pneumonia at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, a few days after being hospitalized for an unspecified condition, his spokesman, Stephen Huvane, said.
Just 10 days earlier Ritts had photographed actor Ben Affleck for a Vanity Fair magazine cover and was directing music videos, Huvane said.
Ritts, who lived in Los Angeles, is survived by his partner, Erik Hyman, as well as his mother and three siblings. Private memorial services were planned, Huvane said.
Ritts photographed the icons of almost three decades in fashion spreads, album covers, advertisements and music videos.
A native southern Californian, Ritts began his career in the late 1970s by snapping informal portraits of friends in the movie industry while he worked in his family's business selling rattan furniture.
His work often took him to movie sets, and in 1978 he snapped a breakthrough photograph of actors Jon Voight and Ricky Schroeder on the set of the film ``The Champ'' that found its way into Newsweek magazine.
Ritts' career as a commercial photographer was launched two years later with a photograph of a young Richard Gere, then starring in ``American Gigolo,'' at a gas station in the California desert.
FROM MASAI TO MADONNA
He developed a personal style doing a range of subjects, from fashion spreads to nude studies of Masai women in Africa. to famous portraits of pop singer Madonna in Mickey Mouse ears, jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and actor Jack Nicholson made up as ``The Joker'' for the film ``Batman.''
His spare, often narrative spreads were a mainstay in Vogue, Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone magazines. He was known for breaking down celebrity to its essential elements -- Jackie Joyner-Kersee's powerful legs and torso, Elizabeth Taylor's wide-set eyes and diamond ring.
In the last decade, Ritts' work was celebrated in exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, and the major cities of Europe.
Curators at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston described Ritts as ``an image maker for our time ... who translated our culture's dreams and desires into strong memorable pictures.''
Ritts's success was not limited to stills. In 1991, he directed music videos for Chris Isaak and Janet Jackson that won top honors at the MTV awards.
He collected his wide-ranging work in six books, including studies of gender, gay couples, celebrity and African people and landscapes.
Ritts once told an interviewer that he did not have a favorite among the sometime unforgettable images he made. ``Too many stand out to me and I like the fact that they do,'' he said. ``I like to bounce around from fashion to portraiture to fine art to nudes to even moving imagery, and I like to mix it up and bring back what I've learned.''
He credited his sense of play and a desire to capture a particular moment -- not his easy access to celebrities -- with his success, saying: ``To me it's important to have an image that is a photograph first, not about necessarily who that person is.''
