Celeb snapper Ritts dies at 50

Leading fashion and celebrity photographer Herb Ritts has died from complications of pneumonia at the age of 50.

Ritts, whose pictures helped define the image-conscious 1980s and 1990s, died at the University of California, Los Angeles, Medical Centre, yesterday, his publicist Stephen Huvane said.

Ritts’s access to celebrities, even at their most fragile moments, gave him an edge in the competitive world of photography. He photographed Christopher Reeve, wired up and immobile in a hi-tech wheelchair. In another photograph, Elizabeth Taylor sported a crew cut and the scar resulting from her brain surgery.

Ritts was born in Los Angeles in 1952, and after school, had a job as a sales representative for his family’s furniture business.

Chance and connections propelled Ritts into the world of celebrity photography in the 1970s. He got to know Richard Gere through someone who was dating the actor at the time.

A drive in the desert led to a flat tyre and an impromptu photo session in a petrol station. The result was a photo of a steamy Gere in a white vest, his arms over his head and a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

“I can’t remember whether I told Richard to put his arms over his head or whether I just clicked when he stretched. And he really smoked a lot. He was like that, a handsome kid and very sexy,” Ritts said in an interview for a catalogue that accompanied a show at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in 2000.

At the time, Gere was an unknown. A year later he was a star, and Ritts’s photos were being used as publicity shots.