Herbert "HERB" Ritts

Herbert Ritts, Jr. enjoyed a comfortable childhood. Born on August 13, 1952 to parents who owned a profitable furniture business in California, Ritts was part of a family who lived in a mansion in Beverly Hills and also had a summer home on fashionable Santa Catalina Island. Young Ritts grew up in glamorous surroundings, with movie stars for neighbors.

Ritts had not decided what profession to pursue, but he certainly was not considering a career in photography, which he had only recently taken up as a hobby. It happened, however, that in 1978 he had his camera with him when he and a friend, the then little-known actor Richard Gere, had to stop at a gas station to repair a flat tire.

He photographed Brooke Shields for the cover of the Oct. 12, 1981 edition of Elle and he photographed Olivia Newton-John for her Physical album in 1981. Five years later he would replicate that cover pose with Madonna for her 1986 release True Blue.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Ritts photographed notables such as, Christopher Reeve, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, Dalai Lama, Mikhail Gorbachev, Francesco Clemente, George Clooney, Cher, Mel Gibson, Elizabeth Taylor, Brad Pitt, Ronald Reagan, Julia Roberts, Steven Hawking, Nicole Kidman, Edward Norton, Tom Cruise, Michelle Pfeiffer, Dizzy Gillespie, Elton John, Annette Benning, Antonio Banderas,  Jack Nicholson, , and many others.

He took many fashion and nude photos of supermodel Cindy Crawford and eventually set her up with his good friend, actor Richard Gere, at a BBQ held at his mother Shirley's house. The couple married four years later in 1991, but divorced in 1995.

He also worked for the magazines, Interview, Esquire, Mademoiselle, Glamour, GQ, Newsweek, Harper's Bazaar, Rolling Stone, Time, Vogue, Allure, Vanity Fair, Details, and Elle. He photographed Prince for his The Hits/The B-Sides greatest-hits package released in 1993. He published many books on photography for leading fashion designers including, Giorgio Armani, Revlon, Ralph Lauren, Chanel, Gianni Versace, Calvin Klein, Elizabeth Arden, Donna Karan, Cartier, Guess, Maybelline, TAG Heuer, Lacoste, Gianfranco Ferrè, Levi's, Victoria's Secret, Gap, Acura, CoverGirl, Lancôme, and Valentino. From 1996 to 1997 his work was displayed at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, attracting more than 250,000 people to the exhibit and in 2003 a solo exhibition was held at the Daimaru Museum, in Kyoto, Japan.

He also take photos for Pirelli calendar at 1994 in Paradise Island, the Bahamas.

Herb Ritts photos:

Norman Parkinson - out of the studio

Norman Parkinson (21 April 1913 – 15 February 1990) 

 "I like to make people look as good as they'd like to look, and with luck, a shade better"

English photographer and eccentric whose career saw fashion photography transform itself from decorative depiction of aristocratic ladies to a more commercial and democratic medium. After apprenticeship to the court photographers Speaight & Sons of Bond Street, he set up his own studio at the age of 21. Like Cecil Beaton, Parkinson was noted for taking his sitters out of the studio and encouraging them to move naturally, resulting in elegant portraits captured in contrastingly grimy or working‐class environments. Sittings with contemporary figures including the Sitwells, Vaughan Williams, and Kathleen Ferrier for publications such as The Bystander, Life, and Look led to a close relationship with Condé Nast from the 1940s to the late 1970s. Parkinson pioneered the outdoor use of colour photography with then difficult to source early 35 mm stock, which he used for landmark fashion imagery for American Vogue. Many models were exulted to fame by Parkinson including Celia Hammond (who he discovered for Queen magazine), Jan Ward, Adele Collins, Davina Taylor, Carmen dell'Orefice, Enid Boulting and the first 'supermodel' and wife of fellow photographer Irving Penn, Lisa Fonssagrives.He spotted Nena von Schlebrügge, the mother of Uma Thurman at age 16 when she left her senior school in Stockholm, and brought her to London to model for Vogue Magazine.
In 1963, Parkinson moved from Twickenham to Tobago, where he set up a pig farm and marketed his famous ‘Porkinson's Bangers’ sausages. One of the first fashion photographers to enjoy personal celebrity, he was latterly known as the unofficial royal portraitist.

"The only thing that gets in the way of a really good photograph, is the camera".

Norman Parkinson Photo Gallery

Brian Duffy - man of ART

Brian Duffy - self portrait

First years


Duffy was born to Irish parents in London in 1933. During World War II he was evacuated with his two brothers and sister to Kings Langley where he was taken in by the actors Roger Livesey and Ursula Jeans. After only three weeks his mother, unhappy about her four children being split up from the family insisted they all return to London. They were evacuated once more to Wales but returned to London having experienced living on a primitive farm after a month.
In 1950 he began  St. Martins School of Art at first wishing to be a painter but soon changed to dress design. He finished in 1953 and immediately began working as an assistant designer at Susan Small Dresses after which he worked for Victor Steibel, preferred designer to Princess Margaret.


Professional career


In 1955 he began freelancing as a fashion artist for Harper's Bazaar. It was here that he first came into contact with photography. Inspired by the photographic contact sheets he saw passing through the art director's desk he decided to find a job as a photographers assistant. Unsuccessfully, he applied for a job with John French, after which he managed to get a job at Carlton studios and then at Cosmopolitan Artists. He left there to take a job as assistant the photographer Adrian Flowers. While working for Flowers he received his first photographic commission from Ernestine Carter, the then fashion editor of The Sunday Times.
In 1957 he was hired by British Vogue where he remained working until 1963. During this period he worked closely with top models of the period, including Joy Weston, Jennifer Hocking, Paulene Stone and Jean Shrimpton.
Apart from Vogue, Duffy also worked for publications including Glamour, Esquire, Town Magazine, Queen Magazine as well as The Observer, The Times and The Daily Telegraph. He also worked on contract for French Elle for two periods the first between 1963 and 1968, and the second between 1971 and 1979.
In 1965 Duffy was asked to create a Pirelli calendar which he shot on location in Monaco. He was commissioned to shoot a second calendar in 1973 which he created in collaboration with British pop artist Allen Jones and air brush specialist Phillip Castle

One morning in 1979, Brian Duffy, then one of the most famous photo-graphers in the world, came into work. One of his assistants told him they had run out of toilet paper. His memory is hazy, he admits, but what happened next became an ­episode of snapper folklore.
"He realised," he recalls in a documentary that airs on BBC4 ­tonight, " that He was making decisions about toilet ­paper. And He thought This has got to end. Either by me murdering my staff, killing myself, or setting fire to the whole fucking thing." So he gathered every negative and transparency he had ever shot and burned them on a fire in his back garden. After that, he never took another picture.
Except, as it turns out, negatives do not easily catch fire. And when they do, they produce an acrid black smoke: this bonfire ended when an official from Camden council peered over the fence and insisted Duffy put it out. Duffy packed what remained away in shoeboxes in his attic and turned to painting and furniture-restoring. It was only in 2007, when his son Chris went through the boxes, that he reluctantly agreed that they were worth another look. This led to a show in London last year – the first, anywhere, of his career.
To devotees of photography, these surviving pictures were like a salvaged stack from the library at Alexandria. Lost portraits of Michael Caine, John Lennon, Nina Simone, William Burroughs, ­Reggie Kray and many more. And ­fashion shots that remind us how this man  created the visual spirit of the swinging 60s: making ­fashion fun, colloquial, young.
In 2009, at the behest of his son, Chris, Duffy resumed work as a photographer and shot images of people he had photographed in the 1960s and  70s.
Duffy died on 31 May 2010, after suffering from a degenerative lung disease

Brian Duffy photos

John Lennon

Arnold Schwarzenegger

David Dowie

Richard Avedon - wonder boy of fashion photography

The New York Times:  "his fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century."

Richard Avedon (15.05.1923 - 1.10.2004)

Richard Avedon has taken some of the greatest celebrity photographs in the 20th century. Avedon was born in 1923 and began working as a department store photographer in 1944. In 1945, he began working for Harper’s Bazaar, taking photographs of Andy Warhol, Jacques Cousteau, Brigitte Bardot and Buster Keaton throughout his career there.

Avedon also worked for Vogue, Look and The New Yorker during his storied career. Also he  make fashion advertisement photograph series  for Gianni Versace, starting from the spring/summer campaign 1980. He also photographed the Calvin Klein Jeans campaign featuring a fifteen year old Brooke Shields.
Avedon is known for his minimalistic photographs of celebrities and public figures, typically in front of ordinary backgrounds. In 1959, Avedon worked alongside Truman Capote on a book documenting the most important people of the 20th century. Richard Avedon was voted by Popular Photography magazine as one of the ten greatest photographers in the world.

Some photography of Richard Avedon:

Ansel Adams - Sensei of nature photography 20th

Ansel Adams

Through his work, Ansel Adams remains one of the most famous male 20th century photographers. Adams specialized in nature photography in the American west. Ansel Adams was born in San Francisco in 1902 and began working with the Sierra Club at the age of 17. His love of photography grew during this time and he often made trips up the Yosemite Mountains on photography excursions.
The Sierra Club Bulletin published Adams’ first photographs. He soon also focused his love of the Yosemite Mountains into work lobbying the government to create more national parks. Adams used his photography for environmental purposes, employing his artwork to help create more national park systems. In 1968, Ansel Adams received the Conservation Service Award and, in 1980, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work.
In September 1983, Adams was confined to his bed for four weeks after leg surgery to remove a cancer. Adams died on April 22, 1984, in the ICU at the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula in Monterey, California at the age of 82 from a heart attack.

Ansel Adams: "It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium."

Adams’s artwork is some of the best environmental photography of the 20th century.

A.Adams photo gallery