Picture Herb Ritts as the King of Lenses : His commercial work earns him up to $20,000 a day, his coffeetable-book sales are booming and his exhibitions attract mobs of celebrities

There they were, actor Richard Gere and Lucite furniture sales rep Herb Ritts, out in the desert waiting at a gas station for a flat tire to be fixed. Ritts, who had just started taking photographs of his friends, picked up his camera and shot three rolls of film.

Gere took the film to his publicist, the publicist got it to Mademoiselle, Esquire and American Vogue, and Ritts started getting checks in the mail. Never mind that he never studied photography, was using only natural light and was fooling with a camera with an automatic light meter. A little while later Mademoiselle sent him out to shoot Brooke Shields, a friend’s friend connected him up with Italian Harper’s Bazaar, and a star was born.

That was 1979, and 11 years later, 36-year-old Ritts may well be the nation’s hottest photographer. He commands $20,000 a day on commercial work, has contracts with such major-league magazines as Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone and exhibitions that start at his dealer, Fahey/Klein, on La Brea Avenue, then move on to New York, London, Japan and elsewhere. His publisher, Jack Woody at Twelvetrees Press in Altadena, says the rush for Ritts’ two books--at $60 and $65 apiece--has rivaled that for Cabbage Patch dolls.

Why Ritts? Why now? Part of his appeal is obviously society’s eternal fascination with its celebrities. Prominent 20th-Century photographers from Edward Weston to Irving Penn to Annie Leibowitz have photographed stars, showing us Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich or Diane Sawyer, respectively, in ways we hadn’t seen them before.

As for the nudes that dotted Ritts’ first two shows and filled his entire third show, says David Fahey, they’re simply classics, “not manipulated or structured, just more or less focusing on the lines and reinterpreting the nude in a romantic, traditional way. . . . They’re beautiful photos by an important emerging photographer who has done well in establishing himself.”

Ritts’ collector base is very broad, Fahey says, and most people buy more than one piece. Screenwriter Franc Caggiano, for instance, has seven of Ritts’ photos: “I have photographs of male bodies going back into the 1890s,” says Caggiano, “and Herb’s work sort of summarizes what male beauty is as we move into the 1990s. I have Mapplethorpe but he seems like the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and Herb seems like what’s coming up.”

Despite or perhaps because of his success, Ritts is often compared with Robert Mapplethorpe, and not always favorably. One dealer sniffs that Ritts simply “panders” to current tastes, while others say Ritts’ nudes just capitalize on the Mapplethorpe boom. Ritts, in turn, denies the influence of Mapplethorpe. More likely, he says, is the influence of ‘40s and ‘50s photographer George Platt Lynes, who also photographed both celebrities and nudes, “and I think even Mapplethorpe was influenced by him.”

Voted “most likely to succeed” at both Paul Revere Junior High and Palisades High School, Brentwood-raised Ritts studied economics at Bard College, got into law school but opted instead for the family business of designing and manufacturing Lucite and acrylic furniture and accessories. He went to work as a sales rep and, he says, did well.

But opportunity intervened. When in New York on a business trip, he showed his paper bag full of fashion prints to “the girl friend of a friend” who happened to work for Italian Harper’s Bazaar, and, a few weeks later, big metal cases arrived from Milan full of men’s clothes. And when he had to rent out rooms of his Hollywood Hills house to help pay the mortgage, one of the people he rented to just happened to be male model Matt Collins, whom he took out to Santa Monica and, with no assistant, no lights, no nothing, photographed under the pier in those great-looking Italian clothes.

When Ritts started with his agent, Marysa Maslansky at Visages, in 1979, his fee was in the $750-a-day range. For the last six months, says Maslansky, his rate has been in the $20,000-a-day range, and that doesn’t include buyouts and other rights, materials, expenses or his two assistants. Citing an average for such work at about $5,000 daily, Maslansky guesses Ritts could be the highest-paid commercial photographer working in the United States today.

According to Maslansky, his clients today are mostly ad agencies, movie studios and record companies; “the top advertisers and fashion houses can afford him,” she says. Calls come in from all the world, she says, adding that he can comfortably turn down work such as shots of a foreign-based recording star who was not only willing to pay those prices but fly to California for the shoot.

Ritts employs two printers full-time at his Hollywood studio, a former ballet studio. There and on location, he does his fashion shoots and his portraits of such personalities as David Bowie, Jack Nicholson, Sylvester Stallone or Shirley MacLaine.

There’s such an ingenuousness about Ritts as he shows a visitor his books, a recent magazine spread and even his house that it’s easy to understand how he gets his photo subjects relaxed and cozy with him. He seems simultaneously embarrassed and thrilled about his gorgeous, newly remodeled home, and, during a tour of the place, he tosses off that he’s now redoing a Malibu beach house as well. He refers to himself as “nerdy looking” in college, and he still is anything but glitzy with his tentative smile, glasses, slicked-back hair and black T-shirt, jeans, socks and loafers.

But there is a great confidence as well. This is a man who can photograph Madonna in his own back yard, Mel Gibson in a parking lot and suggest that Sam Shepard wear Ritts’ old black T-shirt instead of his own nice dress shirt. For a fashion shoot for the British publication Tatler, he came up with the idea of a hunting story, then eschewed male models for young aristocrats he shot on location.

He still hasn’t studied photography, but he clearly knows his photographers. His home is filled with photographs by such masters as Weston and Cartier-Bresson, Outerbridge and Man Ray (nearly all displayed on built-in ledges so Ritts can move them around easily). He was introduced to and then by Bruce Weber early on, and he numbers among his influences Edward Weston (for his “classic simplicity”), Helmut Newton (for his risk-taking), Joel-Peter Witkin (for his “daring eroticism”) and Irving Penn (for his “continual strengths”). There’s a wonderful Berenice Abbott photo of New York at night in his library.

High-profile photographers such as Leibowitz and Ritts, much as Irving Penn and Richard Avedon before them, are well known for editorial and/or commercial work that brings in money as well as visibility. (Leibowitz’ famous photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono is currently selling for about $7,000.) But dealer Fahey estimates that only about 100 fine arts photographers today can live off their work--as compared with maybe 30 just five years ago--and most photographers still teach, make frames, sell art or otherwise supplement their income.

For one thing, there are simply more photographers. At the Los Angeles Photography Center, director Glenna Avila says technical classes that used to attract three or four people are today drawing 45. The 500 photographers in their registry who want exhibitions compare with about 75 just two years ago. “In the past, we were doing more solo exhibitions,” says Avila. “Now we do almost entirely group shows to accommodate demand.”

Even so successful a photographer as Leland Rice figures he gets only about 50% of his income from the sale of his work. The Berkeley-based artist says that although he may get $6,000 for a photograph, he gives half to his dealer, then subtracts the sizable costs of producing his large-scale color pieces.

John Divola, a well-received local photographer whose work is showing at Jan Kesner’s gallery, works full time as an associate professor at UC Riverside and says candidly, “I would have a hard time living on the money I make selling work. Any rational person thinking about a vocation would not choose fine arts photography.”

Ritts says even he is making no killing in the fine arts market. He is pleased about his gallery sales but says it isn’t the money. “In a few days worth of advertising, I could probably make as much as I made from my half of the print sales in this show. And it takes a lot of time and effort to supervise (the gallery installation). The fact it does well is icing on the cake.”

The books are more icing. Both his shows have traveled extensively, timed to publication of his books, and publisher Woody say the two Ritts publications have been his best-selling books yet, despite their high prices. “Herb Ritts’ Pictures,” a $60 coffeetable-size book of celebrities and some nudes, went through three printings totaling 24,000. The second, “Men/Women,” is smaller, composed of two books in an elegant slipcase, and has already gone through two printings at $65 each.

Woody figures each will eventually sell as many as 40,000 copies. “When we ran out of the first printing, people were screaming,” says Woody. “They wanted their books. It was kind of a frenzy.”

Turning the pages of each of his books very, very slowly, Ritts looks at his photographs of Sylvester Stallone or Jack Nicholson or a female nude with the affection of a parent showing photos of a newborn. Books, he says, have more permanence. He has two other books in the works, neither of which he wishes to discuss.

Better to talk gallery shows.

The 20 Ritts pieces in G. Ray Hawkins’ 1985 group show (of Ritts and two other photographers) were portraits and nudes and were priced from $400 (for smaller work in an edition of 25) to $600 (for “murals”--or anything over 16 by 20--in an edition of 12), says dealer Fahey, formerly director of the Hawkins gallery. Some of those pieces are selling today at $2,500 to $4,000, says Fahey, and “Fred With Tires,” a popular piece in that show, now sells for $6,000.

Ritts’ prices escalate during a show, which is not that unusual in this field. Says Fahey: “I make them reasonably priced until 20 of the 25 are sold, and the last five are way up there.”

The photographer’s first one-person show was in November, 1988, and his second closed Jan. 13. That last show featured a cocktail buffet dinner for 50 before the official opening, and Fahey says guests included Tracy Chapman, Barry Diller, Elton John, Madonna, Matthew Modine, Nicholson, Pee-wee Herman, Stallone and David Hockney. Guests dined on chicken piccata, wild rice cakes with caviar and apple crisp, and Vanity Fair printed photographs of the event.

Then came the official opening. About 1,900 people showed up, Fahey says, adding that “at one point we couldn’t get anyone in or out the door.”

Ritts’ nudes also just showed in New York, where Etheleen Staley at Staley-Wise gallery says thousands showed up for that show as well. “Herb Ritts sells very well,” says Staley. “He has a very big following, from students who get together their pennies to major collectors.”

Ritts went to London earlier this month for his Feb. 5 gallery opening at that city’s Hamiltons Gallery, and Fahey says that as early as December, Hamiltons presold 25 pieces. In April, it’s on to Tokyo’s Parko Gallery, where Ritts reports that more than 15,000 people came to his last show.

“In the 16 years I’ve been in the business, there is no other photographer who has sold as well or been received as well in this short a period,” Fahey says. “He’s a ferociously hard worker.”