2000 Herb Ritts,Palazzo delle esposizioni; Rome, Italy
Herb Ritts; Galleria Carla Sozzani; Milan, Italy
Selected Works
Female Torso with Veil, Paradise Cove, 1984
Madonna, Hollywood, 1986
Male Nude with Tumbleweed, Paradise Cove, 1986
Black Female Torso, Los Angeles, 1987
Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Point Dume, 1987
Jump, Paradise Cove, 1987
Jack Nicholson II, London, 1988
Stephen Hawking, Pasadena, 1992
Maasai Woman and Child, Africa, 1993
Jim Carrey, Culver City, 1995
Further Reading
Ritts, Herb.Pictures. Altadena: Twin Palms Publishers,
1988.
———.Men/Women.Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers,
1989.
———.Duo: Herb Ritts Photographs Bob Paris and Rod
Jackson.Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 1991.
———.Notorious.Boston: Little, Brown, and Company/
Bulfinch Press, 1992.
———.Africa.Boston: Little, Brown, and Company/Bul-
finch Press, 1993.
———.Work.Boston: Little, Brown, and Company/Bul-
finch Press, 1996.
———.Herb Ritts.London: Thames and Hudson, 1999.FRANZ ROH
German
Franz Roh was born in Apolda, Thuringia, Ger-
many in 1890, and he died in Munich on 30 De-
cember 1965. Those two facts and a few others
consisting mainly of exhibition and publication
dates and book titles constitute the entire evidential
autobiographical literature about Roh. We know,
for example, that his doctoral thesis and subse-
quent book were titledDutch Painting of the 17th
Century. We do not know about the life he lived
from birth through the World War I years to the
award of his doctoral dissertation in 1918. Between
1919 and 1925, he published one book—Nachex-
pressionismus—Magischer Realismus...[After Ex-
pressionism— Magic Realism...], and he authored
art criticism for the journals Ciceroneand Das
Kunstblatt.But it is Roh’s work from the six-year
period, 1927 to 1933, which defines him as a figure
important to the history of twentieth-century
photography; as a photographer, curator, pub-
lisher, critic, and author, his major contribution
was his role in organizing the seminal 1929Film
und Fotoexhibition. The paucity of personal infor-
mation about Roh, however, has made it nearly
impossible to use his life experiences to assess his
art ideas, which has obscured and perhaps margin-
alized Roh’s considerable achievement in shaping
photographic practice and culture as it evolved in
the 1920s.
European artists of the twenties were in rebellion
against antiquated Victorian dogmas and the dra-
conian and calloused thinking of The Great War
leadership that so devastated Roh’s generation.
Artists reproached the absurdity of the reigning
authority through the proclamations of new ideals,
realized passions, and secular rationalizations. The
actions and art of the young divided one generation
from the other and one century from the other.
Roh’s was not a generation that honored silence
about personal life choices because to be silent was
to be complicit. Yet the record is blank about
Roh’s military service in World War I, surely a
formative period that may have had an impact
upon his mature beliefs and later work in photo-
graphy. The record is so gaunt that the first words
of Juliane Roh’s essay in the monographicRetro-
spektive Fotografie: Franz Rohbegin this way:
U ̈ber Franz Roh als Fotografen kann ich aus perso ̈nlicher
Erfahrung wenig berichten. [About Franz Roh as a
Photographer I can relate very little from personal
experience].
Roh’s linked roles of publisher, critic, and cura-
tor were an outgrowth of the literary studies Roh
undertook first in Weimar and then in Basel, Swit-
zerland, Berlin, Leipzig, and Munich. These studies
culminated in a 1918 assistantship with the art his-
torian Heinrich Wo ̈lfflin. His introduction to
photography is unknown, but in 1929, Roh pub-RITTS, HERB