Herb Ritts, Greg Gorman: The God-Makers of the City of Angels

Blind Magazine

10/1/2026

Guénola Pellen 

Herb Ritts, Greg Gorman: The God-Makers of the City of Angels

Within the walls of Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los angeles, the portraits of this angelic trinity recliam their rightful status as theogony, that ancient art of bringing gods into being. 

In 1978, Herb Ritts photographed his friend Richard Gere, then an unknown actor, in a tank top, arms raised, muscles taut. Out of that chance session came a portrait that would help forge his status as a sex symbol: something carnal and animal emanates from it, a raw physical presence sharpened by the oblique, sovereign light of California.

Greg Gorman, trained in cinematography at the University of Southern California, and Matthew Rolston, discovered by the artist Andy Warhol while still a student at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, moved in the same creative circles as Herb Ritts, those of a Hollywood in full reinvention. Beyond that community, the three artists shared a singular gift: the ability to turn virtually any individual into an icon.

To do this, they applied to photography codes as old as art history itself. Court painters relied on costume; religious painters, on light and scale. Herb Ritts photographed the Irish singer Sinead O’Connor with her head tipped back, her shaved skull offered to the light like a sacrament. The photographer liked to strip his subjects of every superfluous ornament to reveal the archetype beneath, treating light like a chisel.

Gorman, for his part, worked close to his subjects: his black-and-white images, tight, intimate, and shadowed, hunted for the spark particular to each gaze, as in his portrait of a young Leonardo DiCaprio. Rolston, meanwhile, built sets, chose costumes with exacting care, and composed each image by invoking precise pictorial and cinematic references, elevating the portrait to the rank of a small theater, or a film dressing room. Under his lens, a fifteen-year-old Drew Barrymore, her hair cropped short and slicked back, dressed androgynously, recalls the features of a young Elvis Presley.

Vogue and Vanity Fair’s design director, Charles Churchward, named this constellation “The School of Los Angeles,” noting that their rise “marked a significant shift in the imaging of celebrity.” Matthew Rolston shares that intuition. As he told Print magazine: “I think glamour — and glamour photography — is a substitute for god and goddess worship. The altar is the photo studio. So the goddess comes to the dressing room like she would’ve come to the preparation chamber of a temple. She’s anointed with oils and potions — that would be the hair and makeup team. It is really the same thing.”

Andy Warhol, the founder of Interview magazine, played the role of go-between in this story. Upon discovering, within its pages, Matthew Rolston’s photo essay on a new generation of Hollywood actors, the inventor of Pop Art wrote in his diary: “Matthew is our best photographer now.” Greg Gorman, for his part, made one of the most striking portraits of Warhol himself: tightly framed, in opaque black sunglasses, his white hair haloed around his head, the New York artist appears as impenetrable there as the celebrities in his own silkscreens.

Magazine covers, album sleeves, music videos, films. The images of Herb Ritts, Greg Gorman, and Matthew Rolston coursed through the visual culture of an entire generation raised on MTV. Rolston traces that lineage himself: “Andy Warhol and Helmut Newton were the architects of the postmodern revival of Hollywood glamour.” Immortalized by Herb Ritts, Cindy Crawford, leaning over k.d. lang in a barber’s chair, her face lathered in shaving cream, moves in for a kiss.

This visual language, sensual and meticulously crafted, has long since outgrown California and the confines of photography itself, taken up the world over, even by reality television’s fleeting stars and influencers in the making. Models, after all, are never in short supply. Greg Gorman put it simply: “In my eyes, everybody is interesting; a celebrity, so to speak, in their own right.”

“The School of Los Angeles: Herb Ritts, Greg Gorman & Matthew Rolston” runs from October 1st through November 28, 2026, at the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles.

Opening reception: Thursday, October 1st, 2026, 7–9 p.m.

Artist talk: Saturday, October 3rd, 2026, 2–4 p.m.

Guénola Pellen | Guénola Pellen is a journalist specializing in culture and the United States, where she edited the magazine France-Amérique for 15 years. She divides her time between Paris and New York.