Celebrated US Hollywood photographer Herb Ritts has died at the age of 50.

For nearly 25 years Ritts photographed celebrity icons for fashion spreads, album covers, advertisements and music videos.

His famous portraits included Madonna wearing Mickey Mouse ears, and Jack Nicholson made up as The Joker for the Batman film.

Ritts died on Thursday at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles from complications caused by pneumonia, his spokesman Stephen Huvane said.

Ritts' work was a mainstay on celebrity magazine covers

He had been admitted to hospital a few days previously with an unspecified condition, Mr Huvane said.

Ten days earlier Ritts had photographed actor Ben Affleck for a Vanity Fair magazine cover and was directing music videos.

Ritts, who lived in Los Angeles, began his career in the late 1970s by taking informal portraits of friends in the movie industry while working in his family's furniture business.

His breakthrough came in 1978 when he took a photograph of actors Jon Voight and Ricky Schroeder on the set of the film The Champ.

The picture made Newsweek magazine and paved the way for his career as a commercial photographer.

Two years later he photographed a young Richard Gere, then starring in American Gigolo, at a petrol station in the California desert.

Ritts, pictured with singer Tina Turner, also directed music videos

He developed a personal style doing a range of subjects, from fashion spreads to nude studies of Masai women in Africa.

His spare, often narrative spreads were a mainstay in Vogue, Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone magazines.

In the last decade, Ritts' work was celebrated in exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, and the major cities of Europe.

Curators at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston described him as "an image maker for our time ... who translated our culture's dreams and desires into strong memorable pictures".

Favourite

Ritts' success was not limited to stills. In 1991, he directed music videos for Chris Isaak and Janet Jackson that won top honours at the MTV awards.

Ritts once told an interviewer he did not have a favourite among his images.

"Too many stand out to me and I like the fact that they do," he said.

"I like to bounce around from fashion to portraiture to fine art to nudes to even moving imagery, and I like to mix it up and bring back what I've learned."

Ritts is survived by his partner, Erik Hyman, as well as his mother and three siblings.