bohemea: Kate Moss by Herb Ritts, 1994

For Frangry, but also for me… To me, this is the epitome of Herb Ritts and the essence of Kate. When I was in AP Art History, our final assignment was to choose any artist in history and create a comprehensive study of his/her body of work. Everyone else picked some dead-art flower painters but after seeing this and some of his other work (and his amazing music videos) I chose Ritts.

It was his photos that made me a photographer, that made me really understand what making pictures was all about. When I moved to Los Angeles I found a lot of people who knew him and resented him, resented the production of his photos, but that’s when I first really understood that art is not about the tools or the medium, but is about the emotion the work evokes. There are a million camera dorks who can tell you all about barrel distortion and chromatic aberration, but only a handful in this entire world who could capture this moment of intimacy, and that was Ritts’ true art. It wasn’t about the camera kit, or the fame of the subject, it was about the feeling captured within his frame.