Herb Ritts

Exemplifying the blurring of lines between photojournalism, advertising, and art, these four collections of celebrity portraiture are less a record of high aesthetic achievement and more time capsules of the last decade’s pop-culture infatuations. Observed side-by-side, the books highlight the photographers’ individual styles and their strengths and weaknesses. Ritts’s ability to capture his famous sitters’ personalities at the height of expression reveal a self-consciousness in Corbijn’s brooding, grainy portraits. But Ritts’s Westonesque attempts at freezing the body as sculpture can seem pretentious next to LaChapelle’s giddy, campy celebrations. Harkening back to the Hollywood photography of George Hurrell, Gorman’s works stand apart for their simple elegance. The Gorman, LaChapelle, and Ritts books are all oversized and lavishly produced?perhaps a drawback, as the box LaChapelle is shipped in will be immediately discarded and the many fold-outs in Ritts will undoubtedly tear. Ultimately, these volumes will be of most interest to fans of the sitters. Art libraries should have the Ritts book?the official catalog of a controversial Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, retrospective?and the LaChapelle, whose vividly colorful works express the most individual style, if not depth. Public libraries that already have Ritts’s last collection (Notorious, Bulfinch, 1992) can pass over this familiar work in favor of Gorman’s genial portraits of today’s stars.?Eric Bryant, «Library Journal»