By the '90s, photographers were pouring into L.A. to build on the culture of celebrity established by Rolston, Gorman, and Ritts. Ironically, to some extent those three photographers moved on -- Rolston becoming a fabulously successful director of music videos and Ritts redirecting his career into the art world.
Ritts died in 2002, marking the end of an era. To be sure, Hollywood is still filled with photographers of prodigious talent -- James White, Art Streiber, Anthony Mandler, Sam Jones, and Sheryl Nields, to name a few. Yet no single photographer defines Hollywood imagery the way Ritts did.
"No one has ever replaced him," says David Harris, the design director of Vanity Fair. "Herb made people look larger than life. He created icons. His pictures were elaborately set up. It was more about the way he positioned his subjects, the way he rendered them graphically. And it was the tonal warmth of the images, both in black and white and in color. When Herb talked about retouching his images, he would use words like 'gorgeous' and 'dewy.' He knew what he wanted."
It is interesting to note that while Ritts launched his career in the late 1970s, it wasn't until 1984 that he began producing the archive of celebrity imagery we know today. That was the year that Vanity Fair was redesigned under editor Tina Brown as a showcase for just such Hollywood journalism, creating a new cult of celebrity in America.
Today that cult seems ambivalent about its idols. The hot celebrity journalism can now be found in US Weekly, In Touch, and Star -- tabloids rich in paparazzi imagery. Magazines like Vogue and Elle favor celebrity covers, but the focus there is on fashion. Then there is the photography to be found on Internet gossip sites. Today's Hollywood imagery is often more ironic than iconic, content to charm us with humor and puerile sexuality. "It's just bloodless," says Harris.
Or perhaps after all it's not the pictures that are smaller today, but the stars, who have never been more disposable. In an age of reality-television celebrity, when movies come on iPod screens instead of the silver screen, when Hollywood idolatry is defined by blogger Perez Hilton, movie glamour can't mean what it once did. Let's hope that it makes a comeback.
| 1910s | Pioneering filmmakers begin receiving requests for information about, and still images of, the actors in their productions. The Hollywood star system is born. |
| 1920s | Pictorialist photographers, including a young, up-and-coming Edward Steichen, create images of film stars filled with exotic ambience. Fan magazines spring up. |
| 1930s | Movie companies set up large in-house photo studios, creating the golden age of Hollywood glamour, defined by the work of George Hurrell and other photographers. |
| 1940s | The idealized imagery of Hollywood stars comes to an end with World War II. At the same time, the big studios keep a firm grip on how actors are promoted. |
| 1950s | In the postwar era, Hollywood's studio system begins to break apart. Blatant sexuality appears in still images featuring new stars like Marilyn Monroe. |
| 1960s | The realist aesthetic of color film replaces the drama of idealized black-and-white images at a time when America itself begins to doubt heroes. |
| 1970s | A new generation of photographers such as Douglas Kirkland and Terry O'Neill begin to reclaim glamour, but their approach remains essentially journalistic. |
| 1980s | Matthew Rolston, Greg Gorman, and Herb Ritts bring back black and white and update the golden age of glamour with frank sexuality and male eroticism. |
| 1990s | Ritts has a huge show at Boston's Museum of Fine Art; Rolston goes on to direct music videos. On the horizon: The age of the paparazzi and reality-TV celebrityhood. |
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