The School of Los Angeles : Herb Ritts – Interview with Mark McKenna

L'Oeil de la Photographie

10/1/2026

Carole Schmitz

 

The School of Los Angeles : Herb Ritts – Interview with Mark McKenna

The School of Los Angeles, presented by Fahey/Klein Gallery from October 1 through November 28, 2026, brings together Herb Ritts, Greg Gorman, and Matthew Rolston around precisely this territory. The title does not describe a formal movement, nor does it imply a shared aesthetic or manifesto. It names something more elusive: a moment when photography on the West Coast began to understand celebrity not as a subject to be recorded, but as a medium in itself.

Mark McKenna: Memory as a gaze

When a photograph becomes an icon, something is inevitably lost in the process: the conditions, choices, and ideas that made the image singular in the first place. Mark McKenna’s role is to reopen that image.

A photographer, editor, and leading authority on the work of Herb Ritts, McKenna worked alongside the artist and is now closely involved in preserving, editing, and shaping the legacy of his work. His position is unusual: he approaches the photographs not only as historical documents, but as living constructions whose meaning continues to shift. That proximity matters. McKenna’s understanding of Ritts allows us to look beyond the familiar designation of “celebrity photographer” and reconsider the formal intelligence behind the images: the body treated as volume, light as a sculptural force, the reduced setting, the tension between eroticism and geometry. In this vocabulary, glamour is not simply about seduction. It is a way of constructing presence. That perspective finds a broader context in The School of Los Angeles, an exhibition bringing together Herb Ritts, Greg Gorman, and Matthew Rolston. The title does not suggest a formal school, nor a shared aesthetic. Rather, it points to a particular cultural ecology: a Los Angeles in which Hollywood, music, fashion, advertising, and popular culture converged to create an unprecedented machinery of image-making. All three photographers emerged within that landscape, but they approached it differently. Ritts reduced the body to its essential form; Gorman pursued presence, personality, and intimacy; Rolston pushed artifice toward theatricality, turning styling and fabrication into part of the subject itself. Their differences are as revealing as their affinities. Each, in his own way, understood that the photographic portrait does not simply record identity. It produces it. This is where McKenna’s role becomes particularly significant. His engagement with Ritts is not an exercise in preservation for preservation’s sake. It is an act of critical retrieval: looking beneath the finished image to understand how it was constructed and why it continues to exert its power. What emerges are not simply bodies and faces, but attitudes, desires, codes, and myths.

Seen from this perspective, The School of Los Angeles is less a gathering of celebrated photographers than a study of a decisive shift in visual culture. In Los Angeles, photography became inseparable from the machinery of celebrity and, increasingly, from the manufacture of the celebrity itself.

Herb Ritts is closely associated with sculpture, geometry and Californian light. Were these simply aesthetic markers, or a deeper way of thinking about the body and personality?

Mark McKenna: Herb’s sense of form and keen eye for composition originates from his parents’ influence. His father Herbert Sr. was a furniture designer and ran a successful company designing and manufacturing rattan furniture in the 50s and then transitioned to working with acrylic in the 60s and 70s. Herb’s mother Shirley was an interior designer and was instrumental in the success of the family furniture business. Their design and visual aesthetics extended well outside of the business and were part of their daily lives and home décor.  As a young man prior to becoming a professional full-time photographer Herb worked in the family business. The design influences he was surrounded by had a direct impact on his approach with composition and visual aesthetics. Trying to describe what the California light meant to Herb is equal to explaining why humans need water and air. Probably best if this is left to a poet. What I can say, Herb, like a sorcerer of the sun, understood where to place the light and the shadow be it high noon or the golden hour, summer or winter as no other. The light he grew up with was his ultimate tool. It gave him the ability to create an ingenious space for him and the subject to collaborate outside the constraints of the typical studio experience.

What did Ritts bring to his subjects that other photographers could not? Why did a star need to be photographed by Herb Ritts? 

Mark McKenna: Because Herb was born and raised in Los Angeles, he brought an immediate level of comfort and trust with the subjects. Herb’s next-door neighbor was Steve McQueen. At that time Steve McQueen was one of the biggest Hollywood movie stars you can imagine but for Herb it was just his neighbor who would take him and his brothers motorcycle riding and the neighbor happen to have an acting career. With the entertainment and film business based in Los Angeles it is a company town and no different than a town or city with a single industry providing the livelihood for the community. Herb understood this early on and was part of that fabric of the industry.  When he started photographing actors and actresses, he didn’t walk into a session idolizing them as movie stars, he understood this was just a part of their jobs, and he was there as an equal professional getting the work done. The subjects always knew he was going to capture them at their best.

His images often achieve an almost timeless perfection. Did this perfection erase the individual behind the archetype- or, paradoxically, reveal something deeper?

Mark McKenna: Herb did not approach the subjects with a preconceived projected vision of them and certainly was not intending to erase something from the subject’s personality or character. The core of Herb’s approach was highlighting and reveling something in the subject which most of us overlooked even if it became obvious once he captured it. Most of the time he was not focused on a physical attribute, but he was using his lens to capture the “It” of a subject’s persona and the moment they were sharing. Even when he photographed a subject many times over years, he would create a fresh approach in each sitting with an unfettered creative sensibility.

Herb Ritts arrived in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, as Hollywood, music, fashion and popular culture began converging in new ways. How inseparable is his work from this cultural transformation of Los Angeles?

Mark McKenna: The beauty of Los Angeles is that it is always transforming. Herb, Greg and Matthew arrived at time when the old studio system was no longer fully controlling all the actors and creatives careers and thus giving a fresh approach in how the business of Hollywood was getting done.  The old rules no longer applied. Each of them was able to take advantage of this unbridled era to create their own unique path with their vision and image making. Herb’s choice was getting out of the studio and capturing these iconic subjects in common settings with natural light.

What was the nature of Ritts’s relationship with his subjects? Beneath the formal control of his images, was there a genuine intimacy with the people he photographed?

Mark McKenna: Herb was incredible at fostering a level of comfort with the subjects in his sessions that created an unguarded spontaneous environment with a dance of shared moments between Herb and the subject, there just happened to be a camera with a roll of film between them. This was truly Herb’s gift.

Warhol understood early on that celebrity could become artistic material, while Interview helped circulate these new images. What role did Herb Ritts play in transforming celebrity into a visual language?

Mark McKenna: With his lens Herb was instrumental in capturing the uninhibited essence and spirit of someone typically only seen on the silver screen at a theater and make them feel relatable to a viewer.

Placing Herb Ritts alongside Greg Gorman and Matthew Rolston reveals three different ways of constructing an icon: idealizing, revealing, transforming. Is this a useful way to understand their differences, or does it oversimplify their practices?

Mark McKenna: While I don’t think any of these three image makers would want their body of work reduced to a one-word summary, these single descriptives are not inaccurate. They can certainly become the foundation for a larger conversation of their work

Can we really speak of a “School of Los Angeles”? Or does the term describe more a community, an era and a creative ecosystem than a true artistic movement?

Mark McKenna: This is an interesting question. For me personally, these three photographers are my “School of Los Angeles”. I know I am in a small club of photography assistants who had the opportunity and honor to work with each of them in the 1980’s and eventually staying with Herb until his passing in 2002. That time can be described with all those terms but as someone who picked up a copy of Interview Magazine as a teenager far from Los Angeles, I found inspiration and dreams within the pages of their printed work, it is an era now long gone and not seen again.

More than twenty years after his death, what remains radically contemporary about Herb Ritts’s vision? What do today’s photographers and image-makers still understand from what he invented-consciously or not?

Mark McKenna: While Herb was a self-taught photographer, he was a passionate observer and collected the fine print work of those that came before him. The common thread in the work he was drawn too was the elegance of simplicity in composition and attention to the detail. These became the defining elements of his own work which he honed to perfection.

Text & Interview Carole Schmitz

The School of Los Angeles

In Los Angeles, celebrity has never been simply a matter of fame. It is a visual material, a language, a construction. In a city whose primary industry is the production of images, identity has always been less a fixed condition than a form of spectacle.

From the late 1970s through the 1980s, the photographic portrait underwent a decisive shift. The classical portrait had traditionally operated under the promise of revelation: the photographer would somehow penetrate the public mask and disclose the person behind it. In Los Angeles, that premise became increasingly unstable. There was no longer necessarily a person behind the image waiting to be revealed. There was an image to be constructed, manipulated, intensified.

This distinction is crucial. Ritts, Gorman, and Rolston did not simply photograph celebrities; they participated in the production of the very visual identities through which celebrity was experienced. Their studios became laboratories in which bodies, faces, light, fashion, gesture, attitude, and cultural references could be assembled into a new kind of photographic fiction. Yet their practices could hardly be more different.

Herb Ritts approached the body as structure: he reduced celebrity to the essential architecture of flesh, gesture, geometry, and light, turning glamour into something almost sculptural. Greg Gorman moved in the opposite direction, toward psychological instability, using the face as a threshold between public persona and private presence. Matthew Rolston treated identity as theatre, constructing elaborate images in which the celebrity becomes character, quotation, disguise, and performance.

What binds them is therefore not style but a critical position: the refusal to pretend that the icon is natural.

Their work belongs to the moment when the photographic portrait became increasingly aware of its own mechanisms. Glamour ceased to be merely an aesthetic of perfection and became a technology of transformation. The studio was no longer simply a place where a photograph was taken; it became a place where identity could be rehearsed, edited and manufactured.

This is also what makes Los Angeles different from a simple geographical backdrop. Hollywood had spent decades perfecting the manufacture of stars. These photographers inherited that machinery and turned the camera back toward it. They understood that the celebrity image was already a fiction and that photography could expose, complicate, or deliberately deepen that fiction.

Seen together, Ritts, Gorman, and Rolston describe three distinct responses to the same historical rupture. One constructs the icon through the body. One searches for the unstable subject beneath the surface. One makes the surface itself the subject.

The three texts that follow examine these practices not as variations on glamour, but as three different theories of the photographic portrait: Ritts and the body as sculpture; Gorman and the face as psychological territory; Rolston and identity as performance.

What emerges is less a school than a constellation and, within that constellation, a fundamental change in the status of the photographic image. The question was no longer simply who is being photographed? It was becoming something more troubling and more contemporary: Who is being invented?