Herb Ritts

Photographer of the famous and fashionable

Herb Ritts, photographer and filmmaker: born Los Angeles 1952; died Los Angeles 26 December 2002.

Earlier this year, the photographer Herb Ritts was asked to give his advice to young photographers. He replied: "Feel your surroundings. Try and develop a style. Don't get caught up in the technical side of things. Feel what is right in terms of light, subject and composition. Dare to experiment, catch a moment."

Ritts's photography became identified with the sensationalist glamour of the 1980s. He was one of the favoured photographers of magazines such as Rolling Stone, Interview, Vogue and Vanity Fair. His photography looked dangerous and real, but never did damage to the smooth surface of stardom. Designers such as Donna Karan, Versace and Armani saw in Ritts an ability to make images which would sell their products skilfully to a young and media-conscious audience; jeans, business suits and big sparkly frocks became iconic objets in a culture which was increasingly dominated by product. In his campaigns for the low budget "work clothes" company Gap, Ritts invested the everyday and the ordinary with the gorgeous glitter of High Hollywood.

By the end of the 1980s, his talents as an advertising photographer were much in demand, and clients included Calvin Klein, Guess, Revlon, Chanel and Cartier. Though Ritts was heavily involved in the world of fashion, he will always be known as a photographer of the famous. He shaped the image of Madonna in his photographs for the covers of the albums True Blue and Papa Don't Preach, and it was his picture of Madonna which appeared on the cover of Tatler in 1986, as Britain began to embrace the idea of celebrity as never before. Ritts directed music videos, bringing the sensuality of his still photography into film, making promotions for Michael Jackson, NSync and Chris Isaak in the early 1990s.

Ritts's career in many ways typified contemporary culture. The son of a prosperous Los Angeles furniture manufacturer, he grew up in some splendour, sharing the family's Brentwood mansion with his three siblings and his parents, Shirley and Herb. Their nearest neighbour was the Hollywood star Steve McQueen. From an early age, the Ritts children were inculcated with the value of hard work – though they had their own wing of the house and countless luxuries, they nevertheless had lists of household chores to accomplish every day.

Though Herb Ritts completed an East Coast college education (at Bard College, where he studied economics and art history) he soon returned to Los Angeles, working for a while in the family firm, but increasingly attracted to the world of film and celebrity. He was fascinated by black-and-white photography, its ability to transform the body into a series of shapes and planes, to make the human face and form sculptural without the interference of colour.

Ritts's first professional assignment came in 1978, when he made stills on the set of The Champ. On the film set, he learnt some of the disciplines which would be so important in his later career, the ability to work alongside others, to observe the magical processes of hair, make-up and styling, even to become acquainted with the necessary tedium of the big shoot.

In Hollywood, he had met the then unknown actor Richard Gere. Ritts photographed Gere in the desert, arms above his head, dressed in a white shirt, and these photographs, used by Gere's publicist, played their part in Gere's rise to stardom. Even then, Ritts was making photographs with that seductive combination of gritty reality and raw glamour which he would later bring to his portraits of Madonna, Cindy Crawford, Tina Turner and Tom Cruise.

Like many photographers working for magazines and advertising campaigns, Ritts was aware of the transitory nature of his work. Photographic immortality is achieved only between hard covers, and from the late 1980s up until his death, Ritts's work was assembled in a number of monographs, including Pictures (1988), Men/Women (1989); Notorious (1992) and the gigantic Herb Ritts in 2000. Though Ritts had been showing his work in galleries since the late 1980s, his shows were usually small selling displays around the United States, most often on the West Coast, infrequently in New York. The critical and curatorial establishments were wary of the new breed of contemporary photographers whose work constantly crossed the line between culture and commerce.

It was a British curator who had taken up the post of Director of the Gund Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, who staged the first survey show of Ritts's work in a major American Institution. Malcolm Rogers, who had gone to Boston from the National Portrait Gallery in London, had observed at first hand the transformation (under Roy Strong) of a venerable but dull British museum into a conduit for pop and celebrity culture. Rogers believed the Boston MFA needed to "embrace more contemporary interests and aspirations – a breath of fresh air . . . The chemistry is exciting, and neither the MFA nor Boston will be quite the same again."

The exhibition, backed by Donna Karan, was sumptuous and skilfully designed, with salon hanging, gradations of grey walls, film and music stars, fashion people, pictures from Africa, current personalities and the, by then, obligatory shock content, roughly divided between "reality portraits" (the actor Christopher Reeve in a wheelchair, contentious pictures of children) and a wall of sand-coated penises.

The Boston critics were only half-impressed: "It's a quick-read art for the attention span of the 90s," wrote Christine Temin in the Boston Globe. "Ritts is for looking rather than reading. There's no theory, almost no wall text, minimal labels. Compared to other recent shows in the Gund . . . this one is fluff . . . Ritts is fun, all style and little substance, slick and seductive." Commentators on the MFA show were also quick to notice the growing importance of the relationship between famous photographer, wealthy sponsor and cash-strapped museum, and the debate around "product placement" in museums was soon to become one which would engage curators, museum boards and the media over the coming decade.

Herb Ritts, like his close contemporaries Bruce Weber and Steven Meisel, photographed celebrity and fashion – the unreal, the styled, the made-up, the carefully controlled – in a way that convinced us that the stars, the supermodels, even statesmen and politicians, were part of our everyday world. A little richer, a little more travelled, a little better dressed, perhaps, but ultimately available, accessible. Ritts's photographs could sell us plain clothes ,undistinguished perfume and pop music not because he made them mysterious and magical, but rather because his photographs told us that they were ours for the taking.

Val Williams