Fred with Tires

Carl placed a comment at a older post about Herb Ritts

Especially for Carl I made this update about that picture.

Herb Ritts delighted in the portrayal of an idealized--even exaggerated--human form. One of his best-known works, "Fred with Tires" (1984) became possibly the archetypal photograph of the male body in the 1980s and made the world-wide reputation of its commercial photographer, Herb Ritts. Gay men flocked to buy it. Drawn by the powerful, perfectly sculpted body, the butchness of his job, the dirty trousers, the boots and the body placed within the social context. The image of this guy was a constructed fantasy, not the 'real' thing. His hair is teased up and beautifully styled, the grease is applied to his body just so, his body twisted to just the right degree to accentuate the muscles of the stomach and around the pelvis.

 

Ritts eschewed realism in making Fred appealing in the midst of all the sludge and grunge — makeup turned into grease and tires into something intrinsically mysterious. There were many details/entendres: converging lines of the torso, diverging lines of arms and tires, the oversized zipper, but the photo was not really posed.

Ritts remembers:

“Each time I did assignments or editorials, I realized that I wanted to do something more. I saw that it wasn’t just about the clothes. Starting in 1984, I had an assignment for Franca [Sozzani], for a magazine called Per Lui, which was the counterpart of Lei. Lei was the most forward magazine in the early eighties, and it was because Franca was so great in encouraging everyone. I did a story called “The Body Shop”, which is where Fred with Tires emerged from. Franca had sent these really hideous raincoats, and I just hated them. I had hired an editor, a freelance named Michael Roberts, who now works at the New Yorker. We ended up going to Western Costumes and getting vintage jeans and overalls. We decided to do the body shop story at a greasy gas station. It was great fun. We turned in the pictures, and Franca almost had a heart attack. But she ran it, and it was a huge success. I still don’t know why it happened. It was just one of those honest pictures. I remember when we were shooting it. Poor Fred, who was a student, had to swing these heavy tires around, and at one point he was so tired he just turned around and stood there. It was the last frame of the shoot."

Another important, and unnamed, reason for the success of this image is that the model happens to be one of the most famous and successful gay porn actors of the 1980s. Going by the stage name of “Jeff Quinn,” he worked for most of the high quality gay male studios, including Falcon Studios, Catalina Video, Huge Video, and Laguna Pacific Video.

He appeared under the name “Rhett Routley” in the December, 1985 issue of Playgirl magazine as Man of the Month/centerfold, and by 1987, in another nearly dozen magazines aimed at a gay male audience.

 Ritts became well known for dramatic black-and-white photographs that focused on a single part of the subject's body. His portrait of Olympic heptathlon champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee captures her lower torso and powerful thighs in mid-leap; her head appears only in shadow on the ground. Many of Ritts's photographs celebrate the well-developed body. Some of his images have been compared to classical statuary because of the exquisiteness of the subjects' form. Other photos, however, show human vulnerability: Christopher Reeve posing in his wheelchair, Elizabeth Taylor revealing her scar after brain surgery, the brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking struggling against his frailty.

Ritts died in Los Angeles on December 26, 2002, of complications of pneumonia. He had been diagnosed as HIV-positive years before, and although his death was not specifically HIV-related, the virus had compromised his immune system.

He is survived by his partner, Erik Hyman, an entertainment attorney.

Herb Ritts and Michael Jackson

Herb Ritts

When I was looking on the internet for some pictures to decorate club T.R.A.C.S. for the May 1st party I found this famous picture with the greasy garage mechanic.

I did not know who made it, so I did some search and found that it was made by:

Herbert Ritts (August 13, 1952 – December 26, 2002) was an American fashion photographer who concentrated on black-and-white photography and portraits in the style of classical Greek sculpture. Consequently some of his more famous pieces are of male and female nudes in what can be called glamour photography.
Ritts grew up in southern California, and his career began in the late 1970s with informal portraits of friends in the movie industry. The photographer himself attributes his first success to shots of actor Richard Gere taken on a desert excursion that ended with a flat tire. Ritts mastered his craft and developed his personal aesthetic photographing men' s and women' s fashions, often for Italian magazines, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His sequences frequently had a narrative theme and a specific period setting. A fashion spread on jeans and overalls echoes the early Gere portrait: Ritts rented a fifties garage in Los Angeles and cast his muscular models as greasy garage mechanics. Ritts' s eye for period style and his instinct for the timing of fashion revivals enhance his ability to make pictures that fire the imagination.

In the past decade, Ritts has also published several books that bring together photographs around a particular theme. His images capture the beauty of strength and youth, the appeal of the human body, the radiance of California sun and sand, the maniacal grin of Jack Nicholson and the tattooed torso of basketball star Dennis Rodman. Many of these photographs were created independently; others arose from Ritts' s commercial assignments, chosen from the hundreds taken on a given shoot or made at his own initiative immediately after a job. Fine art, design, fashion, photographic media, and global marketing are all dynamically connected in today' s complex culture, and Ritts' s work exemplifies our broadening notion of artistic activity.
At other times, Ritts catches us off guard with an unexpected twist. Madonna is renowned both for her glamour and her outrageousness, and Ritts captures these elements in pictures of her vamping as a classic sex goddess and mugging in Mickey Mouse ears. But his images of the famous blonde stretched and distorted by fun-house mirrors or in eighteenth-century powdered wig take us by surprise.

Ritts was a celebrity photographer of the 1980s and 1990s. He later photographed notables such as, Christopher Reeve, Dalai Lama, Cher, Elizabeth Taylor, Ronald Reagan, Steven Hawking, Edward Norton, Madonna, Dizzy Gillespie, Annette Benning, Richard Gere, Cindy Crawford, and many others. He set up Cindy with his friend, actor Richard Gere. They later married and divorced. He worked for the magazines, Interview, George Magazine, GQ, Harper's Bazaar, Rolling Stone, Vogue, Vanity Fair 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 and Calvin Klein. From 1996 to 1997 some of his work was displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, attracting more than 253,000 people to the exhibit.

He died in 2002 at the age of 50 from complications caused by AIDS.