The Man Who Created Gods and Goddesses With His Camera

The photographer Herb Ritts, whose art was once described as making men and women look "like gods", has died in Los Angeles at the age of 50.

His portfolio of celebrity portraits included Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and Stephen Hawking, as well as Madonna, whom he persuaded to pose in Minnie Mouse ears, and the actor Jim Carrey, immortalised in a mermaid's tail.

He died on Thursday of complications of pneumonia at the UCLA medical centre, according to his publicist. No further details were released. He was cheerfully gay; his family had known since his college days and responded by saying "so what, so long as he's happy" according to his sister.

He was one of the most sought-after fashion and advertising image-makers in the world. Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, told the New York Times: "Herb was not only our key photographer, he was incredibly generous. Unlike others in our field, he was the opposite of a prima donna. He made people feel welcome."

He attributed the origin of his success to a series of photographs taken almost by chance in 1978, when he went on a trip through the Californian desert with a friend, a young actor called Richard Gere. Their car got a puncture and they stopped at a garage to change the tyre. The resulting photographs of Gere, cigarette dangling from his lips, sweaty in faded jeans and white vest, playing on earlier images of Marlon Brando and James Dean, helped make both men into stars. Within a year Richard Gere had got the lead role in American Gigolo, and Ritts was jetting off on glamorous foreign assignments.

He was born in Los Angeles, and first worked as a sales rep for his parents' interior design company, which gave him an entrée into the film world. Photography was originally his self-taught hobby.

Like Peruvian-born Mario Testino, Ritts made the transition from being seen as an image buffer to the beautiful and famous, to being rated as a creative artist. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts held the first major retrospective of his work six years ago, when museum director and curator Malcolm Rogers described his work as "a gulp of fresh air".

"Ritts' people seem like gods and goddesses: they wear few clothes and have few possessions, they are sexually irrepressible, and they inhabit an elemental landscape of earth, air, water and, occasionally, fire," he said. "Like the gods, they also have a wicked sense of humour.