If George Hurrell had never been born, would Herb Ritts have picked up a camera?

Ritts’ oiled-up glamour shots of models, movie stars and rough trade traffic in the same sort of shadowed sexuality that Hurrell made part of his skill set in the 1930s and ‘40s, except Ritts could get his models to pose nude. Hurrell had no such luck.

To its credit, Herb Ritts: L.A. Style (Getty) doesn’t pretend that he was an original, as it reproduces shots from all the photographers that influenced him, many of whom he collected. Ritts was a magpie, taking an idea here, a lighting concept there, focusing less on clothes than on the texture of skin and what lighting could do to illuminate a personality.

I do see Ritts as important in terms of the gay movement, because he openly eroticized straight and gay men and women by focusing on abstractions of beauty, i.e. the component parts - the eyes, the hair, the abs, the butt. Similarly, there’s no real dividing line between his advertising work and his artwork.

When seen in its totality, Ritts’ work has a pansexual groove all its own, and if he used other artists as inspiration, at least he invited everybody to the party.

In the Pipeline…

David R. Godine, the enterprising independent publisher based in Boston, is reissuing Franz Werfel’s Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which was a huge hit in 1933, and the subject of much controversy.

The novel concerns the massacre of more than a million Armenians by the Turks in 1915. Political pressure derailed an MGM movie version later in the 1930s. (The Turks have always denied that any such genocide took place, and if by chance it did happen, it wasn’t their fault.)

The book has been out of print for the last 10 years until Godine reissued it in a trade paperback, with a new translation that restores over 100 pages cut from the German original.

Werfel is probably best known for writing The Song of Bernadette.

Mike Browning’s Word of the Week…

acedia: spiritual apathy.

Quote Unquote…

“Money is coined liberty.”

—- Dostoyevsky