The School fo Los Angeles: Herb Ritts, Greg Gorman, and Matthew Rolston

October 13, 2026 

The Lab Mag 

by Louise Salter 

 

The School of Los Angeles

Herb Ritts, Matthew Rolston, and Herb Ritts 

 

It’s hard to pinpoint moments in history without hindsight. A retrospective glance backward can give us clues to our collective cultural history and, perhaps, point the way forward. The School of Los Angeles is an example of looking back and finding a moment when three young photographers in Los Angeles changed world culture.

It’s hard to imagine today, but Los Angeles in the 70s lacked much sophistication or dream power, especially regarding portrait photography. The city was largely considered a cultural backwater. Back then, the big magazines were on the East Coast. Vogue and others hired photographers and entire style crews for their portrait features and flew them to the city. No homegrown Angeleno photographer would have even been considered. Los Angeles had a very insular entertainment industry: things that carried cultural significance were happening elsewhere. Decades earlier, there had been a golden age of Hollywood portraiture. MGM’s George Hurrell created the goddesses of our dreams in black and white – the epitome of glamour. Rewind even further back, and Ruth Harriet Louise, Hurrell’s predecessor in the silent era, propelled starlets to fame – think Garbo – making a million hearts beat faster.  

In the late 70s, there was a shift, both backward and forward, and the three photographers who were in the right place at the right time were Herb Ritts, Greg Gorman and Matthew Rolston.

Rolston said in an interview for Black & White Magazine with photographer and journalist Mark Edward Harris, “We were the ‘children’ of Andy Warhol, and the photographers Helmut Newton and George Hurrell. They were, to me, the fathers of this revival of glamour. They all knew each other. Warhol’s Interview magazine was the primary place where these three intersected. Andy was a lifelong fan of Hurrell, and they met through his associate, photo historian John Kobal, at the urging of Paul Morrissey.”

Setting the stage, in 1977 Interview magazine brought the master himself, Hurrell, out of retirement for a glamour portrait assignment. Gallerist David Fahey, of Fahey/Klein Gallery, introduced Newton and Hurrell, and they subsequently photographed each other. Newton even helped Hurrell establish a relationship with French Vogue in the early 80s. This particular intersection of friendships and networks created fertile ground for new work.

Rolston explained further to Mark Edward Harris “Being published in Interview created the opportunity for Herb, Greg and me, and, by extension, West Coast portrait photography, to be taken seriously, and for the return of the ‘Hollywood’ look,” says Rolston “This was a major shift in the magazine world, a turning point, one that seems to have started the slow climb of Los Angeles out of the dregs of the 1970s into where it is today: a respected force in art and culture.”

In a voiceover for a proposed short-form documentary, to be written and directed by photographer and journalist Mark Edward Harris and based on his original interview as edited by Dean Brierly for Black & White Magazine, Rolston relayed his thoughts and ideas about the School of Los Angeles. With permission, we have selected some excerpts from that interview for you as part of the celebration of The School of Los Angeles, a 1980s retrospective exhibition curated by Nicholas Fahey featuring the works of Ritts, Gorman and Rolston, currently on view at the Fahey/Klein Gallery.

Mark Edward Harris: The subtitle for your book, Hollywood Royale, is “Out of the School of Los Angeles.” Can you explain?

Matthew Rolston: Charlie Churchward came up with that. A ‘school of art’ is an art-critical term. For example, the ‘School of London’ generally refers to the painters of mid-century London – Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, people like that. So, Charlie had this idea that the revival of Hollywood glamour that started in LA in the 1980s, primarily at the hands of three particular photographers, Herb Ritts, Greg Gorman and myself, made up a kind of ‘school of art’.

MEH: How did you get on Warhol’s radar?

MR: I studied photography at ArtCenter in Los Angeles. Every school break I would go to New York, camp out on the floor of my older brother Dean’s apartment and make the rounds with my portfolio. Dean had an upstart, scrappy, but highly influential gallery in Soho called 56 Bleecker – very connected to Andy’s world. So, I got to hang around with the Warhol entourage and go with my brother to Andy’s 70’s Factory, on Union Square.

I met Robert Hayes, then the art director of Interview and Bob Colacello, editor-in-chief. And of course, I met Andy. So they knew who I was – Dean’s little brother, the ‘photo kid’. Suddenly, they needed someone to shoot a portrait on the West Coast. They weren’t Vogue or Bazaar. They couldn’t afford to send an entire crew. So I got the call. It was just a lucky break, and it was to photograph Steven Spielberg.

MEH: What’s the story behind the image of Madonna in drag, sitting in front of the dressing room mirror?

MR: That was done in ‘86, way before the famous Vogue video David Fincher directed. This was the first time Madonna had ever been imagined in the guise of old Hollywood, or cross-dressed. I decided to image her as a modern Marlene Dietrich. On the dressing-table mirror are some words written in lipstick, a quote from Dietrich’s character in the movie Morocco – she’s a cabaret performer kept by a rich older man played by Adolphe Menjou, but she’s infatuated with a French legionnaire played by Gary Cooper. At the climax, she gives Menjou’s character the slip. He’s supposed to meet her in her dressing room after her final show. Instead, she writes a message in lipstick on the mirror, “I Changed My Mind. Good Luck.”

MEH: How did you come up with the idea?

MR: I was looking to Old Hollywood for inspiration; I used to frequent a bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard called Larry Edmunds. It’s still there, by the way. They had bins of random vintage 8x10 glossies for ten cents each. A publicity still from Morocco became the inspiration for the shoot. But what did my use of Dietrich’s message in Morocco mean for Madonna? Remember, back then they called Madonna the “Queen of Reinvention”. Every time she appeared it was in a new guise. So my lipstick message in the mirror, “I Changed My Mind. Good Luck”, was as if Madonna was saying “You think you know me? Not so much”

MEH: I noticed that Jodie Foster is also cross-dressed, not unlike Madonna, in your portrait of her. 

MR: Jodie was pretty much the biggest female star in Hollywood in 1991 when I shot her for Interview – to celebrate her directorial debut, Little Man Tate. I went back in history for inspiration; the only major female director of the Golden Age that worked for the big studios was Dorothy Arzner, a notorious but closeted lesbian. Arzner wore a signature beret and men’s clothing. So, this was my way of likening Jodie to another great Hollywood director, and maybe a gentle ‘Easter egg’ hint to her own closeted status at the time.

MEH: What was the idea behind Michael Jackson being styled as a king?

MR: Michael called me up one day and said, “I want you to photograph me as a king.” No explanation. He would order shoots and have me do things for magazines that he wanted to do. I didn’t know why he wanted it, stars don’t always explain themselves. Four years later, Michael’s best friend Elizabeth Taylor presented him with the Soul Train Music Award. On stage, she introduced Michael, for the very first time, as the “King of Pop”. I believe he asked her to say that. Just like he asked me to photograph him as a king. All part of his own legend-building.

So I can honestly say that I’m the man who put the crown on the head of the “King of Pop”.

MEH: You included a hot light in the portrait of Lea Thompson – tell us about that shoot. 

MR: That was a vintage 1940’s 2K on a boom. The image is part of “The Bad and the Beautiful” series, a conceptual multi-page portfolio for Interview of emerging stars. By this time, I sometimes suggested the subjects, storylines and even the order and layout of the pictures. The series title was a campy reference to a 50s Vincente Minnelli film – a backstage exposé of Hollywood. Why? Because some of these kids were bad, some of them were beautiful, and some were… well, both.

MEH: You mentioned contradiction earlier. How do you use contradiction in your work?

MR: A good example is the ‘headdress’ portrait of Cyndi Lauper. It was inspired by a still of silent screen star Mae Murray, also wearing a headdress. A cheeky contradiction, since the very outspoken Cyndi has never been exactly the ‘silent type’. The inspiration was another vintage glossy that I found up at Larry Edmunds. A few months later, Cyndi wore the headdress again in her video, True Colors.

MEH: Warhol’s focus was on the mystique of fame which you translated onto film for Interview and other publications. 

MR: You have to look at the nature of the counterculture that Warhol emerged from in the 1960s.  Andy was no hippie, that’s for sure, but in the hippie era, there was a lot of campy, even gay interest in Theda Bara and the vamps of the 20s, stars of the first glamour era. Andy was part of that. He was obviously a gay man and fascinated by fame – and particularly, powerful female figures. When he started Interview, if they couldn’t sell an ad page, he’d run a campy picture of, say, Sonja Henie from Sun Valley Serenade.

Andy wanted to be Louis B. Mayer. And he wanted his Factory to be the counterculture version of MGM. Candy Darling was his Greta Garbo. Paul Morrissey was his Joseph von Sternberg. He wanted a fame factory. Andy’s oeuvre is largely about the subject of fame. Let’s not forget the unforgettable ‘fifteen minutes’ quote.

Fame has taken over our culture. We’re living in the era of the selfie. No one needs to hire me today to reinterpret and reimagine someone like Kim Kardashian. She does that for herself every day of the week. She published a book several years ago for Rizzoli called Selfish. So, there’s no need any more for what Herb, Greg and I used to do, not economically, and not culturally. We came along at a time that we didn’t realize was the last Golden Age of that kind of work.