Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles presents The School of Los Angeles: Herb Ritts, Greg Gorman, and Matthew Rolston, on view from 1 October through 28 November 2026. The exhibition examines seminal work by three photographers who took root in Southern California in the late 1970s and developed distinct approaches to photographing personalities. Together, they reimagined the traditions of glamour and portraiture and created a visual language that continues to influence how fame, aspiration, identity, and beauty are pictured today.
The term "School of Los Angeles," coined by Charlie Churchward, author and former Vanity Fair and Vogue design director, asks whether this shared moment deserves recognition as a distinct artistic movement, one that emerged in the late 1970s and reached its maturity throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Churchward described that "their rise marked a significant shift in the imaging of celebrity." What connected the three was not a uniform aesthetic, but a shared place, generation, creative community, and artistic challenge: how to transform an individual into an icon.
Herb Ritts, through classical form, sculptural posing, simplified backgrounds, geometry, and California light, stripped away the ordinary and transformed his subjects into archetypes. Bodies became sculpture, celebrities became symbols, and contemporary figures could appear almost removed from time. Greg Gorman, through controlled light, closeness, expression, and an unusually intimate relationship with his subjects, sought the personality beneath the public image. Rather than making the celebrity more distant, he brought the viewer closer, creating portraits in which vulnerability, wit, sexuality, and psychological presence became sources of iconic power.
Matthew Rolston, from a postmodern perspective, treated the celebrity portrait as a constructed image rather than a transparent record of identity. Through theatrical lighting, costume, cinematic staging, historical references, and fantasy, he combined the visual codes of Hollywood, art history, fashion, and popular culture. Embracing artifice as both subject and method, Rolston transformed glamour into performance and the portrait into a space where identity could be staged, borrowed, and reinvented. Andy Warhol and Interview magazine provided an important bridge to this distinct Southern California artistic movement, recognizing the potential of the young Ritts, Gorman, and Rolston as icon-makers.
Their photographs circulated through magazines, advertising, album covers, music videos, fashion, television, and film, allowing three highly individual artistic visions to become part of a shared visual culture. That economic system has changed dramatically in the digital age, but the visual language has survived. Contemporary photographers, celebrities, influencers, and brands continue to draw upon the idealization, intimacy, glamour, and transformation in visual culture through the images of Ritts, Gorman, and Rolston. The exhibition proposes a reconsideration of these three exceptional artists whose individual practices collectively defined a particular moment in Los Angeles and in The History of Photography.
Image: Matthew Rolston. Drew Barrymore, Portrait as a Boy, Los Angeles, 1991 © Matthew Rolston, courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles
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