Herb Ritts - Photographs London Wednesday, November 7, 2012 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Private Collection, UK

  • Literature

    Herb Ritts, London: Thames and Hudson, 2000, n.p.
    C. Churchward, Herb Ritts the Golden Hour: A Photographer's Work and His World, New York: Rizzoli, 2010, p. 301
    Herb Ritts: L.A. Style, Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012, pl. 19

  • Catalogue Essay

    “Since his first well-known photograph, which was taken at the beginning of his career in 1978 under the circumstances he has described at length – after an excursion in the desert which ended with a flat tire, his friend Richard Gere posed like a Paul Strand hero at a gas station in San Bernardino – Herb Ritts has bet on the ambiguity of the status of the readable image on several levels…

    “This mixture of innocence, strength, and vulnerability found another emblematic image: the backward dive into an empty sky, taken at Paradise Cove in 1987. Optimism, faith in movement and in the freezing of the image characterise this spectacular shot of a backflip fixed in all the strength of its beauty. The impetus of flight and the mythic reach of the figure Icarus and of athletic effort come together to defy the cosmic law of gravity. But it is also about perfection of gesture and a deferential wink to the pioneers of New Vision, Martin Munkácsi and Alexander Rodchenko with his famous Diver (1936), executed at the Dynamo Stadium, an entirely new vision since, at that time, photographs were generally taken from side angles.

    “Curled up on itself within the celestial matrix, delaying the dread of the fall, which leads to the elimination of self, as illustrated by Yves Klein’s well-known photomontage of a swan dive, the diver signals straight away the predilection Ritts has for upside down and hidden figures (nape, loins, back). But also the cult of and the quest for the male nude.”

    (Patrick Roegiers, ‘Herb Ritts: A High-Flying Stylist’, in Herb Ritts, London: Thames & Hudson, 2000)

34

Backflip, Paradise Cove, California

1987
Gelatin silver print.
134.5 × 111 cm (52 7/8 × 43 3/4 in)
Signed, titled, dated and numbered 5/7 in ink on the reverse of the flush-mount.

Estimate
£35,000 - 45,000 

Sold for £40,850

Photographs

8 November 2012
London