Herb Ritts, Greg Gorman, Matthew Rolston: ‘The School of Los Angeles’

Portraiture As Art

Fahey / Klein, the Los Angeles art gallery devoted to photography, has recently opened a new exhibition, The School of Los Angeles, featuring the work of three legendary L.A. photographers: Herb Ritts, Greg Gorman (born in Kansas, but a  USC Film School attendee), and Matthew Rolston. Their portrait photography of celebrities such as Richard Gere, Madonna, and Cyndi Lauper, have become iconic images seared into our collective memory.

The exhibition’s title is a nod to artist R. B. Kitaj’s nomenclature for his generation of British painters, including Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, and Lucian Freud, whom he anointed as The School of London.

Leonardo DiCaprio, (eyes), Los Angeles, 1994. © Greg Gorman; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

The exhibition is a powerful echo of a landmark exhibition that took place more than forty years ago. In 1985, David Fahey, then director of the G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, curated a show Working in LA that recognized the work of “up-and-coming” portrait photographers Ritts, Gorman, and Rolston, all of whom had worked for Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine.

Interview was started in 1969 as a film-focused publication that evolved into being the arbiter of the famous, the powerful, and the soon-to-be famous and powerful, conducted in Warhol-esque seemingly verbatim conversational interviews, framed by striking full page portraits of the subjects.

Richard Gere (Car with Tires), San Bernardino, 1978.© Herb Ritts Foundation; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

In the late 1970s, New York was a cauldron of creatives intent on transforming culture. Artists like Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kenny Scharf brought a street sensibility and the aesthetics of graffiti to their canvases, while the Pictures Generation, including Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, were recontextualizing images into art, even as Julian Schnabel was making his plates, paintings and Jeff Koons his first readymades. The Ramones, among others, and Blondie were each giving New Wave music an ironic edge.

In this same period, Los Angeles was also incubating a new generation of disruptors, whether it was Frank Gehry with his first commissions, or LA’s burgeoning punk scene (X, Black Flag, The Germs) while artists such as Billy Al Bengston and Ed Ruscha, who had been on the scene for a while, along with British import David Hockney were giving form and shape to LA’s art scene. LA, however, flew under the radar.

All said, with the three photographers rooted in California, one can see in their work both an appreciation of the state’s light but also of Hollywood’s artifice. That they were each gay is not remarkable, but it is significant, not only because of Warhol’s gay aesthetic, but in the revelatory and intimate nature of their work — and the play between insider and outsider for subject and photographer. The idolizing of beauty, the fetishization of celebrities, the irony inherent in camp, were all indicators of gay culture that informed Interview’s portraits.

Andy Warhol, (L.A. Eyeworks), Los Angeles, 1986..© Greg Gorman; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Herb Ritts, who grew up in Brentwood, CA ,took photos of his friend, actor Richard Gere, in front of an old Buick that helped establish both their careers. Ritts went on to work for every major magazine, as well as for fashion designers, record labels and movie studios. He pioneered music videos that would come to define an era. Ritts was enamored of classical forms, and to the extent that Hollywood stars and musical icons became our new Greek gods, it was Ritts that made them so.

Greg Gorman’s works are similarly iconic, including the series of advertisements he shot for LA Eyeworks of figures including Warhol and John Waters. Warhol’s persona and work was itself a blurring of art and commerce. Yes, Gorman’s LA Eyeworks images were commercial work — but as portraits, they stand up as art. Gorman’s subjects look good and are often staged studio shots where dark and light are used to powerful effect. Yet in his work, there is often an intimacy as if the image is telling us something about the subject we might not otherwise get.

Lastly, we have the post-modern portraits by Matthew Rolston that reach back to the glories of Hollywood movie studio photographer George Hurrell, but are conceptual works taking from the past to reveal the artist’s soul. We have Madonna as Marlene Dietrich, Cyndi Lauper as silent film star Mae Murray and Joan Didion as if shot by Richard Avedon, but a kinder gentler version.

Over the years, Gorman and Rolston’s practices evolved and expanded to the point where their artistry is not just acknowledged, but collected. They are each regarded as masters of their craft. Ritts, who at one time was one of the most well-known photographers in the world, regrettably died too young in 2002, age 50, of pneumonia and compromised immunity from HIV.

However, before his death, he established the Herb Ritts Foundation, for which Mark McKennaserves as president and executive director. The foundation maintains Ritts’ archive and the ongoing sale and use of his iconic images while fulfilling its stated mission to “to advance the art of photography and support HIV/AIDS causes in a manner that reflects the spirit and values exemplified by Herb Ritts during his lifetime.” McKenna keeps Ritts’ legacy alive.

Madonna as Marlene, Los Angeles, 1986.© Matthew Rolston Photographer, Inc. All rights reserved; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Seeing The School of Los Angeles is like having a flashback: We know the faces, and delight at seeing the subjects at their prime. There is a magic to these images, whether witty or intimate, each one is in its own way a tribute to the era of legendary magazine art directors, ad agency creative directors, and the great magazines themselves. In its own way, the exhibition itself is being schooled in portrait photography.

Cover image: Mick Jagger and Bette Midler, New York City, 1983. Copyright Greg Gorman. Courtesy of Fahey/Klein, Los Angeles