Education Quote by Herb Ritts

There is something quietly disarming about a photographer casually admitting he never got the credential, then immediately claiming the knowledge anyway. Herb Ritts frames education the way he framed bodies and brands: not as a badge, but as a tool you can pick up, use, and move past. The line pushes against the American fixation on degrees as proof of seriousness. He didn’t “fail” to get the business degree; he simply didn’t need the institutional stamp to find value in the subject.

The subtext is practical, almost entrepreneurial. Ritts worked in a world where art and commerce were never cleanly separated: fashion editorials, celebrity portraits, ad campaigns. Economics, in that setting, isn’t a textbook abstraction; it’s the invisible lighting rig behind creative life. Understanding incentives, scarcity, and markets helps you negotiate fees, price your labor, read a client’s risk tolerance, and spot when “exposure” is just a euphemism for not paying.

It also functions as a small act of self-positioning. By saying he “enjoyed learning,” Ritts claims curiosity over status. He signals a kind of confidence that doesn’t need the résumé line-item, which is a subtle flex in industries obsessed with both pedigree and myth. Coming from a photographer whose images helped define late-20th-century glamour, the remark suggests that behind the effortless sheen is a working professional attentive to the money currents shaping what gets made and who gets seen.