Notorious

Notorious gathers Herb Ritts's black-and-white portraits of the period's most photographed faces. It turns the sculptural, high-contrast studio style he built at Vogue and Rolling Stone toward the specific, self-aware theater of celebrity itself.

Published by Bulfinch Press in 1992, the oversized hardcover collects roughly 168 unpaginated pages of duotone portraits, several printed as fold-outs, issued with photo-illustrated boards and no dust jacket. Ritts's subjects pose against plain backdrops, lit to emphasize skin, muscle and gesture over setting. It is the same vocabulary he had already applied to bodybuilders and dancers, now turned on actors, musicians and models complicit in their own image-making.

Ritts (1952-2002) worked alongside contemporaries such as Bruce Weber and Steven Meisel in defining the look of American fashion photography from the late 1970s onward. He moved between advertising campaigns, music videos and editorial work for Vogue, Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone. Notorious captures that practice at its most direct: portraiture as a controlled, complicit performance of fame.