He was innate around Los Angeles, California to the prosperous personal world health organization owned a furniture business.

Around 1974 he received an economics degree from Bard College in upstate New York and soon when returned to Los Angeles to function as a salesperson for his personal's business.

Nonetheless, Ritts began ingesting nighttime classes within photography and decided to dedicate himself to the art in the late 1970s. His number 1 break into a business occurred following of ingesting portraits of his actor friend Richard Gere. These photograph gained national exposure on the covers of several magazines.

Throughout a 1980s and 1990s he worked with ''Harper's Bazaar, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and Vogue'' magazines on portraits of famous people and artistic photos of models.

Cases of his black-&-white celebrity portraits involved Kofi Annan, Cindy Crawford, Tenzin Gyatso (the Dalai Lama), Madonna, Jack Nicholson and Elizabeth Taylor.

Ritts too directed many music videos. Inside 1991 two of these, Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game" and Janet Jackson's "Love Will Never Do (Without You)", won MTV awards.

Getting been HIV-positive for years, he died around Los Angeles from either pneumonia-related complications. He leaves his partner Erik Hyman.

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